Closest Asteroid Flybys of Earth 2025

What this chart shows: the 15 asteroids that passed closest to Earth in 2025, ranked by their closest approach distance in kilometres. The shorter the bar, the closer the flyby. All 189 asteroids known to have passed within one lunar distance of Earth during the year are in NASA's list; this chart shows the nearest 15.

How the data is collected: NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculates the orbits of all known near-Earth objects forwards to 2200 and backwards to 1900 and works out when and how closely each one approaches Earth. The distance given is the most likely ("nominal") distance from the centre of Earth to the centre of the asteroid, which JPL publishes in astronomical units; it has been converted to kilometres here (1 au = 149,597,870.7 km).

Background: CNEOS describes one lunar distance as approximately 384,000 km, the average distance to the Moon. Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets whose closest point to the Sun is within 1.3 astronomical units. NASA counts an asteroid as "potentially hazardous" only if its orbit can bring it within 0.05 au of Earth (about 7.5 million km) and it is larger than about 140 metres, which corresponds to an absolute magnitude (H) of 22 or brighter. Every asteroid in this chart had an H between 27.9 and 34.1, far fainter than that threshold, meaning they are small objects.

Limits: because Earth's radius is about 6,371 km, a distance measured from the centre overstates how far the asteroid was from the ground; the closest flyby of 2025 passed within a few hundred kilometres of the surface on this measure. The list only includes asteroids that have been discovered, and sizes are not measured directly: JPL estimates a size range from each asteroid's brightness and assumed reflectivity.