Live Near-Earth Tracker
Every week, small asteroids sweep past Earth — almost always many times farther than the Moon, always tracked, virtually always harmless. Here's what's coming, straight from NASA/JPL's CNEOS. Open any one to fly alongside it in 3D and see exactly how close it passes, with the Moon's orbit for scale.
Upcoming Earth close approaches within about 20 lunar distances. Each opens a real 3D flyby built from that asteroid's published orbit — all of them pass safely.
A “lunar distance” (LD) is the average gap between Earth and the Moon — about 384,400 km. Astronomers rank close approaches in LD because it's intuitive: an object passing at 10 LD is ten times farther than the Moon. Most catalogued passes are several to tens of LD away.
Survey telescopes — the Catalina Sky Survey, ATLAS and Pan-STARRS — scan the night sky for moving points of light. When a new asteroid turns up, NASA/JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) computes its orbit and projects every future Earth approach.
Almost never. The objects you see here are routine — they pass and move on, the vast majority many times farther than the Moon. Genuinely hazardous orbits are rare, flagged years ahead, and tracked continuously. A close approach is a chance to watch the solar system at work, not a threat.
Open any object and you fly alongside it: Earth at the centre, the grey ring marking the Moon's orbit, and the asteroid's real trajectory propagated from its published JPL orbit. Press play or scrub the timeline to see exactly how close — and how fast — it sweeps past.
In early 2025, the newly found asteroid 2024 YR4 briefly carried the highest impact probability ever recorded for a sizable object — a small chance of striking Earth in 2032. Within weeks, more observations all but eliminated the risk. That is the tracking system working exactly as it's meant to.
In 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the little moon Dimorphos and measurably shortened its orbit — the first proof that humanity can nudge an asteroid off course before it ever becomes a threat.
On 13 April 2029, the ~350-metre asteroid Apophis will pass about 31,000 km above Earth — closer than geostationary satellites — and be visible to the naked eye from Europe and Africa. It will miss. We've known that for years.