A small asteroid will hit the Earth, no one has ever been so close

A small asteroid the size of a truck will fly by Earth on the night of Thursday to Friday on one of the closest trajectories to our planet on record, but without any danger, NASA announced.

Asteroid 2023 BU, recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will fly by near the southern tip of South America around 0027 GMT on Friday (0127 Paris), NASA said in a statement.

It will pass only 3600 km from the Earth’s surface, which is much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet. But there is no risk that an asteroid will fall to Earth, the US space agency emphasizes. Even if that were to happen, an asteroid 3.5 to 8.5 meters in diameter would largely break up in our atmosphere, potentially dropping only a few debris as small meteorites.

Asteroid discovered on Saturday

The object was spotted on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, the discoverer of interstellar Comet Borisov in 2019. Then, dozens of observations were made by observatories around the world, confirming the arrival of 2023 BU.

NASA’s impact risk assessment system, Scout, quickly ruled out a collision with Earth. “Despite very few observations, he was still able to predict that the asteroid would make an unusually close approach to Earth,” said Davide Farnokchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which developed the Scout.

This is “one of the closest NEO approaches (an asteroid or comet whose orbit intersects the Earth’s orbit) was never recorded,” he adds. The asteroid will approach the blue planet so close that the Earth’s gravity is expected to change its orbit around the Sun. Before its arrival, the asteroid took 359 days to go around our star. According to NASA, 425 will now be required.