Only One Vatira-Class Asteroid Is in the JPL Small-Body Snapshot

Ledger + structural extreme. The ledger is the 40-row Atira population pinned to a specific JPL snapshot, with the top 15 ranked by aphelion. The thesis is that the Vatira class — the population of asteroids with aphelion strictly below Venus perihelion 0.7184 AU — has cardinality exactly one in the JPL SBDB as of 2026-04-13: 594913 Aylo'chaxnim (provisional designation 2020 AV2), with a = 0.5553 AU, q = 0.457 AU, Q = 0.650 AU. The next-smallest aphelions in the Atira population are 0.72 (2025 SC79), 0.75 (2021 VR3), 0.77 (2019 AQ3), and 0.79 (2019 LF6, 2021 PH27, 2024 WD19, 2025 GN1) — all sitting just outside Venus's perihelion. So out of 40 known Atiras, 39 straddle Venus to some degree on each orbit and only one — Aylo'chaxnim — is a true 'sub-Venus' asteroid. This snapshot-pinned cardinality is useful both for asteroid surveyors looking for additional Vatira candidates and for dynamicists modeling the steady-state population of a class that ought to be regularly refilled by perihelion-decreasing chaotic transport from the main belt. It also provides a clean specific number for journalism that often quotes vague 'a handful of Vatiras' or 'first known asteroid orbiting entirely inside Venus' phrasings.

Most asteroids live in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. A small subset have orbits that bring them inside Earth's distance from the sun, and an even smaller subset never go *outside* Earth's orbit at all — those are called Atira-class asteroids, and they're rare (only 40 are currently catalogued in the world's biggest asteroid database). I asked: how many of those 40 also stay entirely inside *Venus's* orbit? That's a much harder ask, because to qualify, an asteroid's farthest-from-sun point has to be closer than Venus's closest-to-sun point — about 0.72 times the Earth-Sun distance. The answer, as of April 13, 2026, is exactly one: 594913 Aylo'chaxnim, a small rocky asteroid discovered in 2020, with a max-sun distance of about 0.65 of Earth's distance. Aylo'chaxnim is the only known asteroid whose entire orbit fits inside Venus's orbit, and it's been the only known one since its discovery five years ago. Several recently-discovered asteroids come *close* — 2025 SC79 just discovered last year reaches 0.72, only barely outside Venus — so it's plausible the world will gain a second Vatira in the next year or two as surveys keep finding tiny inner-Solar-System rocks. But right now the count is exactly one, and you can verify it yourself by re-running the same JPL query against the same database. There's also a fun side observation: two asteroids in this list, 2021 PH27 and 2025 GN1, have orbits that match each other to better than 0.0002 in semi-major axis. Either they're coincidentally on the same orbit by accident, or they're literally fragments of the same parent rock that broke apart at some point and are slowly drifting apart.

0.65 Aylo'chaxnim · 0.72 (2025 SC79) · 0.75 (2021 VR3) · 0.77 (2019 AQ3) · 0.79 (2019 LF6) · 0.79 (2021 PH27) · 0.79 (2024 WD19) · 0.79 (2025 GN1) · 0.80 (2008 EA32) · 0.80 (2020 OV1)

40 Atiras (Q < 0.983 AU = Earth perihelion) · 1 Vatira (Q < 0.7184 AU = Venus perihelion) · the unique Vatira is 594913 Aylo'chaxnim (2020 AV2)

2021 PH27 (a = 0.46180, q = 0.133, Q = 0.79) and 2025 GN1 (a = 0.46200, q = 0.136, Q = 0.79) — Δa < 0.0002 AU, Δq < 0.003 AU