A truck-sized asteroid will fly past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded. NASA insists it will be a near miss with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth.
NASA said Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid will come within 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) of the southern tip of South America. That’s 10 times closer than the multitude of communications satellites circling overhead.
The closest approach will occur at 19:27. EST (9:27 p.m. local time) Even if the space rock came very close, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some larger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.
NASA’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“But despite very few observations, it was possible to predict that the asteroid would come extremely close to Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest known close approaches to Earth.” object ever recorded.”
The asteroid known as 2023 BU, discovered on Saturday, is between 11 feet (3.5 meters) and 28 feet (8.5 meters) across. It was first spotted by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered the interstellar comet in 2019. In a few days, astronomers from all over the world made dozens of observations that allowed them to refine the trajectory of the asteroid.
The asteroid’s path will be drastically altered by Earth’s gravity as it passes by. Instead of orbiting the Sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit lasting 425 days, according to NASA.
