A small, truck-sized asteroid will pass by Earth overnight Thursday through Friday with one of the closest trajectories to our planet ever recorded, but without danger, NASA has announced.
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Asteroid 2023 BU, recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will pass near the southern tip of South America around 00:27 GMT on Friday, NASA said in a statement.
It will fly by just 3,600 kilometers from Earth’s surface, much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet. But there is no risk that the asteroid will hit Earth, the American space agency emphasizes.
Even if this were the case, the asteroid, between 3.5 and 8.5 meters in diameter, would largely disintegrate in our atmosphere, possibly shedding little debris as small meteorites.
The object was spotted on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennady Borissov, the discoverer of interstellar comet Borissov in 2019. Dozens of observations were then made from observatories around the world, confirming the arrival of 2023 BU.
NASA’s impact risk assessment system, Scout, quickly ruled out an impact with Earth.
“Despite the very few sightings, it was still able to predict that the asteroid would make an exceptionally close approach to Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which developed Scout.
It’s “one of the closest approaches of a near-Earth object (an asteroid or a comet whose orbit intersects Earth’s, ed.) that’s ever been 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 arriving, the asteroid took 359 days to orbit our star. According to NASA, 425 are now needed.