We present in the following the introductory talk on “Hazardous asteroids and the Hera mission”, made during the round table on Space Awareness. It reminds the context of our awareness for near-Earth objects, the characterisation of risk, current international surveillance programmes, and mitigation measures in particular with space missions, and last, a rendez-vous with Apophis to note in your agenda for 2029.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) has been cultivated in Latvia since the 17th century, and formal breeding programmes have been established since the start of the 20th century. The Latvian potato genetic resource collection consists of 83 accessions of Latvian origin, including landraces, old cultivars released starting from the 1930's, modern cultivars and breeding material. These are maintained in field and in vitro collections. Pedigree information about the potato cultivars is often limited, and the use of hybrids of local cultivars as parents is common in the Latvian potato breeding programme. Ninety-four Latvian potato varieties and breeding lines and some commonly used foreign accessions were genotyped with the potato DNA diversity array technology. Analysis of the Latvian potato genetic resources collection revealed that the amount of genetic diversity has increased in the modern cultivars in comparison with the old cultivars.

In a previous paper we presented a neural network called FRONTAL that attempted to capture the ability of infants to actively self-organize in a non-stationary environment. This paper describes the procedure whereby FRONTAL is interfaced to a robotic system called DART. DART comprises of a PUMA-562 arm and a real-time image processing system. The implementation procedure consisted of first connecting FRONTAL to a simulated DART robot. After successful operation, FRONTAL was connected to the real hardware DART. The ability of this robotic system to actively explore its surroundings and modify its behavior based on experience and environmental feedback confirms previous simulation results.