204 Asteroids Passed Closer Than the Moon This Year

The Moon sits about 384,000 km away — a distance astronomers call one lunar distance (LD), and a handy yardstick for near misses. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory logs every known asteroid that comes closer than that. We pulled the last twelve months of those logs and counted. The tally is bigger than most people expect, and the closest pass is genuinely startling: a rock that threaded beneath the orbit of the International Space Station.

August 22, 2026  ·  6 min read  ·  all numbers from NASA/JPL close-approach data

A Year of Near Misses

How close they came

Each bar counts the passes whose closest approach fell in that tenth of a lunar distance. The red bar on the left — 12 objects inside 0.1 LD — is the striking one: those came closer than 12 of our own geostationary satellites orbit. The count doesn't taper toward Earth the way you might expect; small asteroids are found in rough proportion to how much sky-time they spend near us, and the very closest are simply the ones we happened to detect on their way past.

The Five Closest Passes

Distances here are measured from the centre of the Earth (that's how JPL reports them); the altitude column subtracts Earth's radius to give height above the ground. For scale: the ISS orbits near 420 km, and geostationary satellites sit at about 35,800 km.

Designations like "2025 UC11" are provisional — assigned when an object is first spotted. All five are small (absolute magnitudes around 28–34, implying sizes from roughly a metre to a few tens of metres); an object this size would break up in the atmosphere rather than reach the ground intact.

Is 204 a Lot? And Should Anyone Worry?

Two hundred near misses a year sounds alarming and isn't. Space near Earth is mostly empty, and "within a lunar distance" is a vast shell — a sphere 768,000 km across. The count is high mainly because detection has gotten good: modern survey telescopes now catch small, dim rocks that a decade ago would have slipped past unseen. A rising number of close approaches is largely a story about better eyes, not more asteroids.

The honest caveat runs the other way: 204 is a floor, not a ceiling. It counts only the objects we detected. Metre-scale rocks are faint and fast, and plenty pass unrecorded — the ones in the table were caught, but the true number of close passes at that size is certainly higher. That's the whole point of the surveys, and of a tool that reads the same feed astronomers do: not to raise an alarm, but to make the sky's routine, well-tracked traffic legible.

Reproduce This

JPL's close-approach API is public and keyless. This re-derives the counts for the same window (numbers shift as new objects are found and old ones refined):

const url = 'https://ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov/cad.api'
          + '?date-min=2025-08-22&date-max=2026-08-22&dist-max=1LD&sort=dist';
const { fields, data } = await (await fetch(url)).json();
const di = fields.indexOf('dist');                 // AU, from Earth's centre
const LD = 384400, AU = 149597870.7;
const ld = r => +r[di] * AU / LD;                  // AU → lunar distances

console.log({
  within1LD:  data.length,
  withinHalf: data.filter(r => ld(r) <= 0.5).length,
  insideGEO:  data.filter(r => ld(r) <= 0.11).length,       // geostationary belt
  closest:    data[0][fields.indexOf('des')],
});
// → { within1LD: 204, withinHalf: 99, insideGEO: 12, closest: '2025 UC11' }

Related reading: a running count of quakes, storms and asteroids happening right now, in Planet & Sky Live; and how far south the aurora reached over the same twelve months, in How Far South Did the Aurora Reach This Year?

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