List of record-setting asteroid close approaches to Earth

This is a list of examples where an asteroid or meteoroid travels close to the Earth. Some are regarded as potentially hazardous objects if they are estimated to be large enough to cause regional devastation.

Near-Earth object detection technology greatly improved around 1998, so objects being detected as of 2004 could have been missed only a decade earlier due to a lack of dedicated Near-Earth sky surveys. As dedicated Near-Earth sky surveys improve, smaller and smaller asteroids are regularly being discovered. The small near-Earth asteroids 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA are the only two asteroids discovered before impacting into Earth. Scientists estimate that several dozen asteroids in the 6 to 12 meter size range fly by Earth at a distance closer than the moon every year, but only a fraction of these are actually detected.

The average distance to the Moon (or LD) is about 384,400 km. Below are lists of close approaches less than one LD for a given year. (See also near-Earth asteroids published by the International Astronomical Union and NEO Earth Close Approaches.):

From the lists above, these are the closest known asteroids per year that approach Earth within one lunar distance LD and without impacting. More than one asteroid per year may be listed if its geocentric distance is less than 0.100 LD. The table shows the year 2016 has six such close encounters. (For comparison, since a satellite in a geostationary orbit has an altitude of about 36,000 km, then its geocentric distance is 0.110 LD.)

Notable cases are the relatively large asteroids 2016 EF₁₉₅ and Duende, with the latter coincidentally approaching just a few hours after the unrelated Chelyabinsk meteor.

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