Comet SWAN26Q – The unconfirmed Scout object warrants monitoring, not concern

Hi, I wrote orbit propagation code that is used to compute asteroids and comet positions for several of the NASA space telescopes.

I refit the orbit and yeah this is not a dangerous object. Given its (currently poorly constrained) orbit it is likely a comet, it came the closest it will ever come to Earth last month at about half an AU from us. (IE: half the distance from the earth to the sun).

It is at about a 110 degree inclination, meaning it is basically perpendicular to the solar system plane and already passed perihelion.

MOID, or Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance, is a basic geometric measurement that says how close the geometric ellipses of two orbits get together. It doesnt mean that the objects will actually be that close ever. For example the MOID of the jupiter trojan asteroids is basically 0 since the orbits are the same, but they dont get close to jupiter. It's really handy to use it to rule out dangerous stuff though, non-zero MOID usually means there is no way it could ever be dangerous.

Here is some of the orbit code I used: https://github.com/dahlend/kete

Another new object discovered by NASA and analysed by Astrophyzix. Asteroid 2026 SX2

https://www.astrophyzix.com/2026/09/asteroid-2026SX2.html?m=...