family of Earth-crossing asteroids that have an orbital semi-major axis less than that of the Earth (a < 1 AU) but an aphelion distance greater than the Earth's perihelion distance (Q > 0.983 AU)
Common orbital subgroups of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)
The Aten asteroids are a dynamical group of asteroids whose orbits bring them into proximity with Earth. By definition, Atens are Earth-crossing asteroids (a < 1.0 AU and Q > 0.983 AU). The group is named after 2062 Aten, the first of its kind, discovered on 7 January 1976 by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory. As of January 2025, 2,966 Atens have been discovered, of which 271 are numbered, 14 are named, and 197 are classified as potentially hazardous asteroids.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).