IAU Minor Planet Center
The IAU's clearing house for asteroid and comet observations, designations, and orbits. CONNECTED: the NEO Confirmation Page - candidate objects awaiting confirmation - is fetched live and shown at /neo/recently-discovered.
Provider status
- Status
- connected
- Data shown
- none on this page — see /space-weather
- Endpoint
- www.minorplanetcenter.net/
- Licence
- Public MPC data (IAU); attribution expected.
- Fetched at
- —
- Stale
- no
This is IAU Minor Planet Center's catalogue entry: what it is, what it serves, and under what terms. It carries no measurement — the live readings from this provider are fetched at request time and shown at /space-weather, each with the provider's own timestamp.
What it provides
- Asteroid & comet designations and orbits
- Near-Earth object close approaches
- New-object confirmations
Limitations
Connected end-to-end since 2026-08-29 through the MPC's published machine-readable NEO Confirmation Page. Those entries are CANDIDATES, not discoveries: one may prove to be an already-known object, not a near-Earth object at all, or an artefact, and most leave the page within days. The bulk orbit files are not ingested, and close-approach predictions come from JPL/CNEOS rather than from here.
Organisation & phenomena
Knowledge connections
- Associated withMinor Planet Center
- Associated withJPL / CNEOS Close-Approach Data
- Associated withJPL / CNEOS Close-Approach Data
Sources
The primary and reference sources this topic draws on.
- Minor Planet CenterIAU Minor Planet Center
Designations and orbits of asteroids, comets, and minor bodies.