Since its foundation, SpaceDyS has played a central role in supporting the planetary defense activities of the European Space Agency through its long-standing collaboration with the Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre.
A key milestone of this partnership is the development of Aegis, an advanced software system for orbit determination (OD) and asteroid impact monitoring (IM). Operated by ESA’s NEOCC, Aegis is a core component of Europe’s autonomous capability to assess and monitor the impact risk posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).

Aegis automatically processes astrometric observations and performs:

• Daily autonomous updates of asteroid data
• High-precision orbit computation for thousands of objects
• Impact probability assessment over a 100-year horizon
• Continuous population of ESA’s official Risk Lis

The system relies on high-fidelity dynamical models to ensure accurate long-term predictions of asteroid trajectories and potential Earth impacts.

Aegis provides ESA with a fully independent European counterpart to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Sentry system, enabling multi-source validation and strengthening global planetary defense reliability.
Built on a modern, dockerized micro-service architecture, Aegis ensures:

• High computational scalability
• Asynchronous processing of asteroid data
• Cloud-native resilience and operational continuity

The latest evolution of the system includes migration to ESA’s private cloud infrastructure, significantly improving computational speed, robustness and readiness to ingest large data streams from next-generation survey telescopes.

Aegis represents a cornerstone of Europe’s planetary defense strategy, combining scientific excellence, advanced software engineering and operational reliability to enhance global asteroid impact monitoring capabilities.