Earth in the cosmic shooting gallery

View larger to get a sense of what many astronomers call Earth in the cosmic shooting gallery. This animation shows near-Earth objects (NEOs) as of 2018. Earth’s orbit is the one in white. Image via NASA/ JPL.

NASA released this animation in 2018. It depicts a mapping of the positions of near-Earth objects (NEOs) known at that time. Why 2018? That year marked 20 years of predictions of possible asteroid collisions with Earth, made at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.