A small asteroid the size of a truck will pass Earth overnight Thursday through Friday. It has one of the closest trajectories to our planet on record, but poses no danger, NASA said.
Asteroid 2023 BU, recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will pass near the southern tip of South America around 1:27 a.m. (Swiss time) on Friday, NASA said in a communiqué.
It will pass just 3600 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet. But there is no risk that the asteroid will hit the Earth, underlines the American space agency, which monitors the sky permanently with its programs Asteroid Watch and its Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects (CNEOS).
>> An animation representing the asteroid 2023 BU around the Sun:
An animation of asteroid 2023 BU (in pink) orbiting the Sun (in yellow). The Earth and its orbit are in blue. [Phoenix7777/CC BY-SA 4.0 – JPL/NASA]
Even if the asteroid, which measures between 3.5 and 8.5 meters in diameter, were to head straight for our planet, it would largely disintegrate in our atmosphere, potentially dropping only a few pieces of debris as small meteorites.
First observed in Crimea
The object was spotted on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennady Borissov, the discoverer of the interstellar comet Borissov in 2019. Dozens of observations were then made by observatories around the world, confirming the arrival of 2023 BU.
This diagram made available by NASA shows the estimated trajectory of asteroid 2023 BU, in red, affected by Earth’s gravity, and the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, in green. [JPL-Caltech / NASA – KEYSTONE]
The NASA Impact Hazard Rating System, Scout, quickly ruled out impact with Earth. Despite the very few sightings, he was still able to predict that the asteroid would be extraordinarily close to Earth, said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which developed Scout.
>> An interactive NASA page to spot the asteroids around us: Eyes on Asteroids
The asteroid will come so close to Earth that Earth’s gravity is expected to alter its orbit around the Sun. Before its arrival, it took 359 days for the asteroid to go around our star. It will now need 425, according to NASA.
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