Every month dozens of NEAs come within 0.05 au of Earth. The following table presents the list of these
forthcoming
and recent close approaches, with details concerning the encounter circumstances.
Among the quantities in the table is the maximum brightness reached by the object at the close approach, useful to estimate its observability during the encounter.
For a detailed description see the "Definitions and Assumptions" page. Entries are by default sorted by date, but the sorting can be changed by clicking on the table headers. In most cases, the size presented in the table is estimated indirectly from the absolute magnitude, and flagged with an asterisk
*
.
The last column provides an assessment on how often one can expect an object of a given size to pass at a given distance and velocity from the Earth.
A colour-coded evaluation is provided indicating whether a given close approach can be considered as
very frequent
(
),
frequent
(
),
infrequent
(
),
rare
(
),
or very rare
(
).
For example, the close approach to Earth of asteroid (99942) Apophis in 2029 will be a very rare event (this case will only appear in the list of upcoming close approaches since April 2028).
The formulation associated to the computation of this close approach index can be found
here.