Hari5115/nasa-neows

NASA NeoWs — Near Earth Asteroid Close Approaches

Every asteroid close approach to Earth from 2000 to today, as tracked by NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). 70,944 close-approach events involving 20,159 unique asteroids — with size estimates, speed, miss distance, and hazard classification for each pass.

Source

• API: NASA NeoWs API
• Data refreshed: periodically via NASA NeoWs public API

Notes

• Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA): NASA classifies an asteroid as potentially hazardous if its orbit brings it within 0.05 AU of Earth and its diameter is ≥ ~140m. Being flagged as a PHA does not mean an impact is imminent — 6,368 of the 70,944 approaches in this dataset are from PHAs.
• is_sentry_object: True if the asteroid is actively monitored on NASA's Sentry impact risk table.
• Diameter columns (diameter_min_m, diameter_max_m) are estimates based on absolute magnitude — not direct measurements.

Usage

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_parquet("data/neows.parquet")

# Potentially hazardous approaches only
pha = df[df["is_potentially_hazardous"] == True]

# Very close passes (under 10 lunar distances)
close = df[df["miss_distance_lunar"] < 10].sort_values("miss_distance_lunar")

# Largest asteroids by estimated diameter
largest = df.sort_values("diameter_max_m", ascending=False).head(20)

# Close approaches per year
df["year"] = df["close_approach_date"].str[:4]
df.groupby("year").size().plot(title="Asteroid close approaches per year")

Attribution

Data sourced from NASA NeoWs (Near Earth Object Web Service), maintained by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This dataset is independently collected from the NASA NeoWs public API and is not officially affiliated with or endorsed by NASA or JPL.