The ones we found afterwards

NASA/JPL close-approach data joined to the Small-Body Database · US Government work, not subject to copyright · 1900–2100 · 1,697 passes inside the Moon’s orbit

A cron reloads the source table from JPL at 05:40 UTC; the dataset refresh re-reads it at 06:25 and rebuilds the wasm extract. A newly discovered object brings its past approaches with it, so a reload can add a pass from 1911.

A dashboard titled "The ones we found afterwards". It opens on a date — 13 November 2020 — and a single large figure, 6,746 km, with a note that the asteroid 2020 VT4 passed closer to Earth than geostationary satellites and was first observed the next day. Three statistic cards read 47.0% of recorded passes were made by an object first seen after the pass, "the next day" as the median gap between a pass and its first sighting, and 115 approaches closer than geostationary orbit. Below, a scatter plot with the date of each pass along the bottom and the date the object was first observed up the side, with a dashed diagonal marking "found it the same day": a broad orange band of points sits far above the line across the whole century, while blue points hug the diagonal only at the recent end. A second scatter puts the same passes on a logarithmic distance axis with dashed marks for the Earth’s surface, geostationary orbit and the Moon. Last, a table of the longest gaps — a pass on 19 June 1911 whose object was first seen in 2026, 115 years later.

A screenshot of the published dashboard, captured from the same URL anybody can open.

Data lane: Query lane
Per view: 115.8 KB fetched, 1 extract
Data age: as of 2026-10-08
Reachability: opens with no account

Measured against the live host, with no credential, on 2026-10-09.

The question it answers

How often does something pass closer to us than the Moon — and did we see it coming?

The data, and over what period

JPL’s close-approach table for every pass inside one lunar distance, joined to the Small-Body Database for when each object was first seen.

How it gets its rows

One query, in your browser, with no key.

What comes back

1,697 rows × 14 columns — one S3 GET, no compute.

What was hard

Distances are measured from the Earth’s centre, so the geostationary ring is 42,164 km and not the 35,786 km altitude. Using the altitude undercounts the passes inside the satellite ring by nineteen.

What happened after the build

Refreshed daily.

The dashboard itself

Open the live dashboard

Still image

The live dashboard loads from the viewer host. Nothing is fetched from it until you ask, so this page does not touch that origin unless you want it to.

https://share.vibedasher.com/eu/vibedasher/the-ones-we-found-afterwards?exec=wasm

What loads here is the published dashboard, from the same address anybody else would open — not a copy kept by hand. The still above it is a screenshot of that same address.

Published by Vibedasher