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.
Not another orbit sketch
Most NEO pages draw ellipses from textbook two-body math and hope for the best. Asteroid Tracker draws every pass closer than 20 lunar distances from JPL Horizons ephemerides for the days around closest approach, so the flyby you watch is the one JPL computes. Between passes, objects ride their JPL orbital elements.
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
The ◐ tilt button (or 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.
Will I see it?
Every asteroid page turns the flyby into your sky: where to look, when, how bright — naked eye, binoculars or telescope — computed by JPL Horizons for your own location.
Honest uncertainty
Every pass is drawn with its 3σ corridor, every orbit with its quality code, and every object with the date it was first seen — including the ones found only after they had already passed.
The blind spot & the feed
The daylight wedge where ground telescopes can't look is drawn on the map, and the Minor Planet Center's confirmation page streams in live: rocks spotted hours ago, not yet named.
Risk & fireballs
JPL Sentry impact-risk flags with odds and Palermo scale, plus a world map of recent fireballs — the small ones that don't miss — with each one's energy, altitude and location.
Notable flybys
Every asteroid predicted to pass closer than two lunar distances before 2100 has its own page: orbit, every Earth encounter from 1900 to 2100, size against things you know, and whether you'll see it from your sky. These four are the headliners.
How it works
No account, no ads — NASA/JPL data, refreshed every three hours.
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.
You fly the timeline
Open the live map, press ▶ (or space) to play, drag the timeline to scrub, and tap ◐ tilt (or T) to see orbits in 3D. The ⏭ next button jumps straight to the next flyby.
Share the moment
Every selection updates the URL — /live?object=99942 opens directly on Apophis's 2029 flyby — and every asteroid page previews its own encounter when shared. Subscribe to the flyby calendar and the passes come to you.