• NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully delivered a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu to Earth. Post-delivery, the spacecraft transitioned to the OSIRIS-APEX mission, targeting the exploration of the near-Earth asteroid Apophis.
  https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/

• The launch of NASA's Psyche mission marked a significant step in exploring a metal-rich asteroid. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/

• NASA's Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the main belt asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh, discovering its binary moon. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-discovers-2nd-asteroid-during-dinkinesh-flyby/

• JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission extended its scope, with a scheduled flyby exploration of the near-Earth asteroid 2001 CC21 in July 2026. https://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/

• Gaia's Focused Product Release (FPR) unveiled a groundbreaking dataset, including 5 years of asteroid astrometry for over 150,000 asteroids. This data, spanning the nominal Gaia mission duration, led to orbits 20 times more precise than Gaia Data Release 3, significantly impacting asteroid mass determinations and predictions of stellar occultations.
  https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/focused-product-release

• The release of SsODNet, an information service on Solar System Small Bodies, provided a wealth of data compiled from 5.5 million numbers, names, designations, and 192 million parameters sourced from approximately 3300 articles. https://ssp.imcce.fr/forms/ssocard/
  Python interface: https://rocks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

• NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) successfully passed its Confirmation review and entered the Implementation Phase, targeting a launch in September 2027. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/

• The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) arrived at the Didymos system and on 26 September 2022 (UTC) successfully executed its intentional crash into Dimorphos, the satellite of Didymos. The immediate aftermath of the crash was imaged by the LICIACube cubesat contributed to DART by the Italian Space Agency. Telescopes around the globe and in space monitored the resulting ejecta cloud as it evolved into a tail, and measured a roughly half-hour change in Dimorphos’ orbit period around Didymos. Official NASA news releases can be found about the impact into Dimorphos (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-dart-mission-hits-asteroid-in-first-ever-planetary-defense-test), the announcement of the period change (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space), and other early results presented at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2022 (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/early-results-from-nasa-s-dart-mission).

• The Data Release 3 by the Gaia mission (ESA), appeared in June 2022 ( https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/data-release-3), is the first large scale publication of asteroid astrometry by the mission, for 158,152 small bodies (asteroids of all types, TNOs, natural satellites of the planets), observed over 34 months. It also includes visible spectra for 60,518 asteroids. The survey properties illustrated by two articles appeared in the special issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics devoted to DR3: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243796; https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243791. Coupled with improved orbital determinations, GDR3 photometric and spectroscopic data are expected to be a primary source for any advancement in asteroids science in the next years.

• NASA Planetary Decadal Survey highlighted key science questions and identified priority missions, giving high billing to asteroid Planetary Defense missions and mission concepts for comet sample return, a centaur tour, and a Ceres lander (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26522/origins-worlds-and-life-a-decadal-strategy-for-planetary-science).

• The marvelous and successful launches of two asteroid missions, Lucy to Trojan asteroids and DART to the binary Didymos. Lucy will provide first detailed data on asteroids from which we have no meteorite analogue and therefore open a new window on our Solar system history. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lucy/overview/index
• DART will perform an impact in a binary asteroid system at a speed that is close to the average one between asteroids, and will change the orbit of the moon Dimorphos around its primary body Didymos. DART will return images until it impacted Dimorphos, and the results will be observed from Earth-based telescopes and an Italian cubesat named LICIACube, released by DART several days prior to arrival.  The ESA Hera mission will rendezvous with the Didymos system to investigate in details the impact outcome in a few years. These missions will allow us to test our asteroid collision models, refine surface chronologies with appropriate scaling rules and feed with parameters at correct scale the collisional evolution models of asteroid populations. https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart/dart-news 
• Ongoing analysis of asteroid Ryugu’s samples after the success of the Jaxa Hayabusa2 sample returning mission https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01550-6
• NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission completed in-situ study of asteroid Bennu and is on its way back to Earth with the asteroid’s samples. https://www.asteroidmission.org/latest-news/
• Successful test of a multi-static radar intended to expand the scientific reach and capability of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)/ The test proved that a new radio telescope system can capture high-resolution images in near-Earth space https://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/37417-a-planetary-radar-system-for-detection-and-high-resolution-imaging-of-nearby-celestial-bodies
• Successful international campaigns devoted to the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis organized by International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) Campaign https://iawn.net/obscamp/Apophis/index.shtml, 
  https://az659834.vo.msecnd.net/eventsairwesteuprod/production-atpi-public/64851a6caad54fbbb59e7724f7f89bc4
• The Pluto System after New Horizons (2021, University of Arizona Press) distills, in 688 pages, our understanding of Pluto, its moons, its place in the Kuiper Belt, and thoughts for ongoing exploration. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/the-pluto-system-after-new-horizons

PUBLICATIONS:

More than 1600 peer-reviewed papers were published in 2021 according to NASA-ADS database, including ~900 papers on asteroids, ~330 papers on comets, and ~370 papers on TNOs and Pluto. The most popular topics were investigations of near-Earth asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, and Pluto.

SOME RESULTS:

• Discovery of the presence of exogenic boulders on the surface of near-Earth asteroids (101955) Bennu https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1195-z­ and­ (162173) ­Ryugu  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1179-z
• The reconstruction of 3D shapes of asteroids using VLT observations that demonstrated the increasing capabilities of Earth-based observations of asteroids https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/10/aa41781-21/aa41781-21.html  
• Possible mechanism of activity of near-Earth asteroid (3200) Phaethon was proposed https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac0d02
• Lunar-like silicate material found on the Earth quasi-satellite (469219) Kamo`oalewa https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html
• Increasing data on the optical color measurements reveled a different surface color distribution of the binary and single cold classical KBOs https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abf04a/pdf
• The long duration observations from the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) revealed early activity in the giant comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli–Bernstein https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac323d The very large size of the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was confirmed  https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13188
• The discovery of the atoms of iron and nickel in the cold coma of Solar system comets https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03435-0 and the first interstellar comet 2I/ Borisov https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03485-4.
• The detection of deuterated methanol in the coma of comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko points to its prestellar origins https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/500/4/4901/5948105
• Pluto’s haze is bimodal in size, follows both Titan-like and Triton-like formation, and may control the temperature of Pluto’s lower atmosphere  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01270-3, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27811-6.  
• Areas of Pluto and Charon previously unseen or obscured were revealed https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103520301895, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac09e9.

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