Asteroid Tracker: Next Near-Earth Asteroids From NASA

In astronomy, “close” is not the same word that humans use day-to-day. A close approach in NASA's catalog usually means the asteroid passes within a few million kilometres of Earth's orbit. For comparison: the Moon, which is the brightest object in the night sky, orbits Earth at an average distance of 384,400 kilometres. That distance — called one lunar distance, or 1 LD — is the unit astronomers use when they want to give a sense of how genuinely close a pass is.

Most of the asteroids in the table above pass tens to hundreds of lunar distances from Earth. A pass at 10 LD is already 3.8 million kilometres away — far enough that no telescope on Earth except the largest professional instruments will pick the object up. A pass under 1 LD is rare and newsworthy; a pass under 0.1 LD (about 38,000 km, inside the orbit of geostationary satellites) is rarer still and is the level at which agencies start putting out educational press notes.

If a real impact threat ever emerged, NASA, ESA, and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs would issue advance public warnings through formal channels. As of now, no such warning is active. Every asteroid on this page passes harmlessly.

The inner solar system is unimaginably crowded. There are several million asteroids larger than a kilometre across in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and tens of millions smaller. A subset of them — the near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs — have orbits that bring them inside Earth's neighbourhood. NASA currently has roughly 30,000+ NEAs catalogued, with hundreds more added every month by ground-based surveys.

Because of this density, the expected baseline rate of “close approaches” (objects passing within about 0.05 AU, or 7.5 million km) is on the order of 100 per week. Most are small objects you would never have heard of without modern telescopes. The numbers feel alarming if you read them without context — but they describe the routine background of the inner solar system, not a recent change in risk.

If anything, the rising number reflects better monitoring. Pan-STARRS, Catalina Sky Survey, and ATLAS together cover the whole sky every few nights, down to objects the size of a school bus. Twenty years ago we missed nearly all of them. Today we catch almost everything larger than 50 metres — and we are getting steadily better at catching smaller ones.

Asteroid tracking is a multi-stage pipeline. New objects are discovered by automated survey telescopes — chiefly the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, the Pan-STARRS array in Hawaii, and the ATLAS network on Hawaii and elsewhere. These telescopes scan large fields of sky every clear night, software flags anything that has moved between exposures, and the candidate detections are reported to the IAU's Minor Planet Center.

Once an object is confirmed, follow-up observations from professional observatories and a worldwide amateur network nail down its orbit. The data feeds into NASA's JPL Small-Body Database and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which runs the Sentry impact monitoring system. Sentry continuously projects each asteroid's orbit forward 100+ years and computes an impact probability for every plausible future close pass. When the orbital uncertainty shrinks — usually after a few weeks of follow-up — most candidates drop off the watch list entirely.

Space-based assets contribute too. NEOWISE, the infrared follow-up to the WISE mission, has discovered hundreds of NEAs. The upcoming NEO Surveyor infrared space telescope, planned for launch in 2027, is designed specifically to find the dark NEAs that ground-based optical surveys miss.

The term Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, or PHA, is one of the most misread phrases in astronomy. It does not mean “going to hit Earth.” It is a NASA monitoring classification with two precise criteria:

• Estimated diameter of at least 140 metres.
• Minimum orbital intersection distance with Earth of 0.05 AU (about 7.5 million km) or less.

Both conditions have to be met together. An asteroid that is large enough but never comes close, or one that comes close but is too small to do regional damage, is not a PHA. The classification simply identifies the objects worth monitoring carefully because their orbits could, on long timescales, evolve into impact trajectories.

There are roughly 2,400 PHAs currently catalogued. None of them have a meaningful impact probability in the next century — every one is being watched and every one is currently expected to miss Earth. The PHA label is best read as “keep monitoring,” not as a forecast.

A few asteroids have entered popular memory either because they came genuinely close, or because they actually arrived.

None of these are imminent. They are listed here as context for how the catalog actually behaves over decades.

Classical Western astrology does not track asteroids. The system was built on the seven visible “wandering stars” — Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn — and was extended only slowly to include Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and a small handful of bodies after they were discovered. The asteroids that are used by modern astrologers form a short list: the four major asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta (all discovered in the early 1800s), plus the centaur Chiron and occasionally a few other named bodies like Eros or Psyche.

Mainstream astrology does not read newly-discovered or incoming asteroids as omens. There is no traditional doctrine that says “an asteroid is approaching, therefore X will happen.” The idea that close approaches are spiritual events is a recent social-media exaggeration, not a part of the tradition. If you see an “asteroid warning” framed as astrological prediction, it is invented framing.

Where asteroids do enter serious astrological work, they are treated like any other symbolic body in a birth chart — sign, house, aspect — and read as a thematic addition to the core seven. Chiron, the most widely used, points to a place of wounding and healing. Ceres maps onto nurture and grief. The honest astrological position on near-Earth asteroids is: interesting astronomy, not predictive astrology.