A small asteroid the size of a truck will pass Earth overnight from Thursday to Friday, with one of the closest paths to our planet on record, but without any danger, NASA announced.
Asteroid 2023 BU, recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will pass near the southern tip of South America at around 12:27 a.m. Friday, NASA said in a statement.
It will pass just 3,600 kilometers from Earth’s surface, much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet. But there is no risk of the asteroid hitting Earth, stresses the US space agency.
Even if it did, the asteroid, which measures between 3.5 and 8.5 meters in diameter, would largely disintegrate in our atmosphere, potentially spewing only a few bits of debris as small meteorites.
An “extraordinarily close approach to Earth”
The object was discovered on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennady Borissov, the discoverer of the interstellar comet Borissov in 2019. Observatories around the world then made dozens of observations, confirming the arrival of 2023 BU.
NASA’s impact risk assessment system, Scout, quickly ruled out impact with Earth. “Despite the few sightings, he was able to predict that the asteroid would come extraordinarily close to Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which developed Scout.
It is “one of the closest approaches of a near-Earth object (an asteroid or a comet whose orbit crosses Earth’s, editor’s note) ever recorded,” he adds.
The asteroid will come so close to the blue planet that Earth’s gravity is expected to alter its orbit around the Sun. Before its arrival, the asteroid took 359 days to circle our star. Now you’ll need 425, according to NASA.
Source: BFM TV
