NASA/JPL data · live

Every asteroid flyby,
on its true path.

Asteroid Tracker maps every catalogued close approach and animates each flyby on real JPL Horizons ephemerides — miss distances in lunar distances, the Moon and the geostationary ring for scale, and a timeline you can play, scrub, and tilt. Free, no account.

The Asteroid Tracker live map: asteroid Apophis passing Earth inside the Moon's orbit
99942 Apophis · 13 Apr 2029 · 0.10 LD — inside geostationary orbit watch on the live tracker →

Not another orbit sketch

Most NEO pages draw ellipses from textbook two-body math and hope for the best. Asteroid Tracker renders the actual ephemeris — so what you see is what JPL computes.

True-to-JPL flybys

Near every close approach, positions come from JPL Horizons full N-body ephemerides — the drawn pass hits the catalogued miss distance. Watch Apophis thread the geostationary ring at 0.10 LD, exactly where it will really be.

Flyby cinema

Motion trails, closest-approach flashes, and a shrinking T− ring on the next pass. Press play and watch a week of rocks sweep past in seconds.

Lunar-distance scale

Zoom in and the Moon's orbit and the GEO ring appear — the frame in which "how close?" actually means something. Earth itself rides its real elliptical orbit.

Tiltable 3D view

Shift+drag lifts inclined orbits out of the ecliptic. Apophis's 2029 path bends 27° around Earth — visible, measured, labeled.

The watchlist

Every known sub-lunar pass out to 2100 — Apophis 2029, 2001 WN5 2028, 2005 YU55 2075 — loaded and framed whether or not they're in the current window.

Risk & fireballs

JPL Sentry impact-risk flags with odds and Palermo scale, plus recent atmospheric fireball detections — the small ones that don't miss.

How it works

No build step, no account, no noise — one page of live data.

1

The server collects

Every three hours it pulls JPL's close-approach catalog, Small-Body Database orbits, Sentry risk list, fireball detections, and Horizons ephemeris tracks into one shared snapshot.

2

You fly the timeline

Open the live map, press space to play, scrub the timeline, T to tilt. The ⏭ next button jumps straight to the next flyby.

3

Share the moment

Every selection updates the URL — /live?object=99942 opens directly on Apophis's 2029 flyby. Browser back/forward walks your selections.