NEODyS provides information and services for all Near Earth Asteroids. Each
NEA has its own dynamically generated home page providing information
and services, and a search facility puts the information in easy
reach.
Near
Earth
Objects
Dynamic
Site
The NEODyS service is in some circumstances time critical (e.g.,
during special observation campaigns for asteroids at risk of being
lost and/or with Virtual Impactors). To increase the availability of
the service, and thanks to the funds from the Junta de Castilla y
León (ref. VA060A07) and of the Spanish Ministerio de
Ciencia y Tecnología (ref. AYA2007-64592), we have
installed a
duplicate NEODyS system at the University of Valladolid (Spain)
. Together with the
original system at the University of Pisa (Italy)
, the new site guarantees availability
even in case of network failures. The two systems are kept aligned, but
occasionally there could be a delay in the update of one of the two,
in particular in case of network problems.
We are doing an effort to provide NEODyS with online help and
captions. However, it is obviously not possible to explain all the
technicalities involved in such a complex information system. The
Tumbling Stone
site had been created precisely to provide more user friendly
information, including an illustrated dictionary of technical terms,
and comments on the most relevant events and discoveries about Near
Earth Asteroids. Unfortunately this site is not currently
maintained.
The same services for other asteroids, including all numbered and
multiopposition orbit objects, can be accessed at
AstDyS.
How does it work?
These important buttons and links are at the top and bottom of every page:
-
Objects
-
To browse the list of objects in the NEODyS database.
-
Observatories
-
To browse the list of observing stations. (You can get a
listing of the NEA observations and residuals for any station.)
-
Search
-
To search for a specific object or for objects with particular characteristics.
-
Risk page
-
Details known possibilities of Earth-asteroid collision. We
operate the impact risk monitoring system CLOMON2, providing an
estimate of the urgency of the problem based upon the Palermo
Technical scale .
-
NEA elements
-
Catalogs of all NEA orbital elements in
OrbFit format, updated daily.
-
Related sites
-
Links to related WWW sites.
- Info & Credits
-
Information page: about Neodys, frequently asked questions, MJD
conversion tables and other infos.
-
[Help]
-
Help window.
-
▲
-
This is the Tools icon (on the right in the top banner). Clicking
repeatedly on it shows the following tools:
Go to nea,
Current date-time,
MJD-calendar conversor
and, finally, color and font-size selectors. When all the
tools are displayed the icon changes to
▼ .
Clicking on
▼
hides the tools and sets the icon again to
▲ .
-
◲
-
Expands the main content area, hiding the banners
and menus, to increase the available on-screen surface for data
browsing. The same icon lets you restore the initial layout.
- Contact »
-
Send feedback to the NEODyS team.
What's new?
- The NEODyS information system has recently changed its web
interface. This was necessary to allow upgrade and maintenance of the
web interface, because the previous version used propietary software
which we could not maintain and which used obsolete libraries. The
new interface will gradually diverge, that is acquire new
functionality. We would appreciate receiving comments on the new
interface.
Other features
- We are operating the impact monitoring service CLOMON2. The
risk pages have a new format and contain more information, including
the
Palermo Technical scale for each possible impact.
- We are providing a link to the animated orbit diagrams
available from JPL (e.g.,
Apophis).
- We are providing proper elements, computed by means of
singular averaging, and encounter conditions; a figure shows the
secular evolution of the proper elements (e.g.,
Apophis).
- We compute not only the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance
(MOID), but also all the stationary points of the distance function
between the orbit of the asteroid and the orbit of the Earth; a figure
illustrates the geometry of the distance function; this is informative
especially in the cases with multiple minima (e.g.,
Apophis).
- We include the daily ephemeris for each object to the
database. This allows an observer to search for all NEODyS objects
that are visible now, or are in a certain region of sky, in particular
taking into account the galactic disk. See the
Search section to give it a try.
- Radar observations now incorporated into our orbital
solutions. For those objects with radar observations, this results in
substantially improved orbits, with far less uncertainty.
- We are now using simpler and constant URL's.
This means that you can put a link
to your favorite asteroid
(e.g.,
Apophis)
or to your favorite observatory
(e.g.,
Highland Road Park Observatory)
on your own web pages. You can also use
bookmarks now, the URL for an object does not change.
What's next?
- We are working on the problem of assigning formal uncertainties,
based upon the covariance matrix formalism, to all the quantities
presented in the NEODyS home page of an asteroid. E.g., the perihelion
distance, the MOID, the period, etc., should have a stated
uncertainty.
Click the icon to access statistics »