Starting from 1 September 2011 NEODyS will be sponsored by ESA, which will pay a portion of the operating costs, both for the background orbit and risk computations and for the database and web interface.
The rest of the cost is covered, as before, by the Department of Mathematics,University of Pisa, with the running research grants of the Celestial Mechanics Group, and by IASF-INAF (Rome), with a PRIN-INAF grant.
The ESA participation is through a contract with SpaceDyS srl, a company of Cascina (Pisa, Italy), which is a startup promoted by same research group which has built and operated NEODyS for the past 12years.
This is the beginning of a transition phase, in which ESA should progressively assume larger responsibility for the operations of NEODyS, under the programmatic envelope of the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) initiative, NEO segment.
The NEODyS service is expected to be federated, together with others including the Spaceguard Central Node and the EARN Asteroid Database, in a new comprehensive SSA-NEO information service.
The University and Research groups will in the near future continue to share the work and the responsibility, and are in any case committed to continue for a long period of time to contribute with research, innovation and certification functions.
