  The near-Earth object (NEO) population is a window into the original
conditions of the protosolar nebula, and has the potential to provide a key
pathway for the delivery of water and organics to the early Earth. In addition
to delivering the crucial ingredients for life, NEOs can pose a serious hazard
to humanity since they can impact the Earth. To properly quantify the impact
risk, physical properties of the NEO population need to be studied.
Unfortunately, NEOs have a great variation in terms of mitigation-relevant
quantities (size, albedo, composition, etc.) and less than 15% of them have
been characterized to date. There is an urgent need to undertake a
comprehensive characterization of smaller NEOs (D<300m) given that there are
many more of them than larger objects. One of the main aims of the NEOShield-2
project (2015--2017), financed by the European Community in the framework of
the Horizon 2020 program, is therefore to retrieve physical properties of a
wide number of NEOs in order to design impact mitigation missions and assess
the consequences of an impact on Earth. We carried out visible photometry of
NEOs, making use of the DOLORES instrument at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo
(TNG, La Palma, Spain) in order to derive visible color indexes and the
taxonomic classification for each target in our sample. We attributed for the
first time the taxonomical complex of 67 objects obtained during the first year
of the project. While the majority of our sample belong to the S-complex,
carbonaceous C-complex NEOs deserve particular attention. These NEOs can be
located in orbits that are challenging from a mitigation point of view, with
high inclination and low minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID). In
addition, the lack of carbonaceous material we see in the small NEO population
might not be due to an observational bias alone.
