NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids has added a more direct way to explore encounters with Earth. In release notes published on 5 October 2026, NASA describes new controls introduced on 30 September for viewing close approaches and past impacts.
A Watch option can take users to the time of a qualifying close approach. The stated distance threshold is 0.05 astronomical units, approximately 7.48 million kilometres. Objects that actually struck Earth in the past can have an Impact tab and a replay of that event.
NASA also limits the viewer’s future time range to ten years to maintain accuracy. A missing animation for a more distant date therefore should not be taken as evidence that nobody has calculated an orbit beyond that point.
Start with the question you want answered
A three-dimensional view can help make an encounter understandable. It is especially useful when a headline gives a large distance without an intuitive sense of the geometry. But an animation cannot answer every question a reader might bring to it.
Before drawing a conclusion, identify the object, the date and the quantity being displayed. Is the page showing a closest-approach distance, a historical impact or a probability calculated from uncertain orbital information? Keeping those questions separate makes it easier to check an alarming claim against the right source.
Follow the orbit information
The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL computes orbits, close approaches and impact probabilities in support of NASA’s planetary-defence work. Its public resources include object-specific information and the Sentry system, which searches for possible impacts over the next century.
That longer horizon explains why the public visualisation and the specialist monitoring tools serve different purposes. A viewer can prioritise an accessible, bounded display while researchers examine a much wider range of future possibilities. For a claim about a particular asteroid, the object’s own record is the appropriate place to continue checking.
Why a risk entry can change
According to Sentry’s technical introduction, an asteroid observed for only a short time can have many possible trajectories consistent with the available measurements. Some may intersect Earth even when the best-fitting path does not. Additional observations help narrow that range.
This is why newly listed objects frequently leave the risk table as their orbits become better constrained. A changing estimate reflects a changing body of evidence. A reader should record when a figure was retrieved and return to the current entry before sharing an old screenshot.
A practical reading order
Start with the animation to understand the encounter, then check the object’s identity and approach date. Read the distance with its units, consult the underlying orbit information, and use the impact-monitoring material if the claim concerns collision probability.
The new controls make NASA’s viewer a useful entry point for that process. Their greatest value is helping people ask more precise questions about the moving objects around Earth, then follow those questions back to the measurements and calculations that can answer them.
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