The Catalina Sky Survey team's NEOFixer service provides ephemerides for near-Earth asteroids, comets and current NEOCP objects for observers with an MPC observatory code registered with NEOFixer.


NEOFixer is not primarily an ephemeris service, its purpose is to help optimize the discovery and follow-up of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) by providing observers with targeting recommendations, specific to their site. See the Why NEOFixer FAQ page for more background.


NEOfixer is designed to be used by active NEO follow-up stations, if you have an MPC observatory code you can create an account with NEOFixer and get a customised, dynamic, prioritised list of useful targets with ephemerides.


After your MPC observatory code is registered with NEOFixer, pressing the NEOFixer toolstrip button will attempt to download an ephemeris for the requested object for the observatory code specified in Obs code. See Retrieve NEOFixer ephemerides for more information on use. 


Note: NEOFixer only maintains ephemerides for undesignated, newly discovered current NEOCP objects and designated NEOs and comets, not for more routine objects such as main belt asteroids. The native NEOFixer page requires designated object identifiers to be in MPC packed form but Ephemeris Interpolator will convert unpacked designations to packed form before requesting an ephemeris, so either form can be entered into Ephemeris Interpolator. NEOCP identifiers (trksubs) are accepted directly.


Internally NEOFixer generates an ephemeris for an object periodically or when underlying information changes. The ephemerides generally span up to 2 weeks with a step size of 15 minutes. When Ephemeris Interpolator requests an ephemeris, the number of dates, interval and unit are used in conjunction with the start date and time to calculate an end date for the ephemeris and this is passed to NEOFixer. Regardless of the interval and unit in the request, the resulting ephemeris will have a step size of 15 minutes.


The MPES/NEOCP/NEOFixer visible only? checkbox can be used to reduce the number of lines returned from NEOFixer to only those where the object is above the horizon at night.

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