List of asteroid close approaches to Earth

Scientists estimate that several dozen asteroids in the 6–12 m (20–39 ft) size range fly by Earth at a distance closer than the moon every year, but only a fraction of these are actually detected.

From the list in the first section, these are the closest known asteroids per year that approach Earth within one lunar distance.

For comparison, since a satellite in a geostationary orbit has an altitude of about 36,000 km (22,000 mi), then its geocentric distance is 0.11 LD (approximately three times the width of the Earth).

This list does not include any of the hundreds of objects that collided with Earth which were not discovered in advance but were recorded by sensors designed to detect detonation of nuclear devices.

Of the objects so detected, 78 had an impact energy greater than that of a 1-kiloton device (equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT), including 11 which had an impact energy greater than that of a 10-kiloton device, i.e. comparable to the atomic bombs detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War.

A notable case is the relatively large asteroid Duende, which was predicted nearly a year in advance, coincidentally approaching just a few hours after the unrelated Chelyabinsk meteor, which was unpredicted, but injured thousands of people when it impacted.

[7] A retrograde parabolic Oort cloud comet (e=1, i=180°) could pass Earth at 72 km/s when 1 AU from the Sun.

Objects with distances greater than 100 km (62 mi) are listed here, although there is no discrete beginning of space.

Trajectory of 2004 FH in the Earth–Moon system
Goldstone radar images of asteroid 2007 PA 8 's Earth flyby in 2012
Satellites in geostationary orbit
Animation of the trajectory of the asteroid 2005 YU55 compared with the orbits of Earth and the Moon on 8–9 November 2011.
Trajectory of the relatively large 2005 YU 55 compared with the orbits of Earth and the Moon on 8–9 Nov 2011
Goldstone radar image of asteroid 2005 YU 55 taken November 7, 2011
All-sky photo with the Earth-grazing meteoroid of 13 October 1990 (the light track across the picture going from the south to the north) taken at Červená hora ( Czechoslovakia ), one of the stations of the European Fireball Network . The bright track on the left is the Moon .
Known near-Earth objects – as of January 2018
Video (0:55; July 23, 2018)
Animation of the 2015 TB145 ( NEO ) flyby, as seen from the center of the Earth , with hourly trace circles along the path of motion
Plot of orbits of known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (size over 140 m [460 ft] and passing within 7.6 million km [4.7 million mi] of Earth's orbit) as of early 2013 ( alternate image )