NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA has declared that an asteroid will pass our planet innocuously on Thursday night. The space agency still claims that the object, which is about the same size as a large truck, will come within a few hundred kilometers of Earth when it passes through the Southern Hemisphere.
NASA refers to it “a very close encounter avec our planet.”
When it passes South America’s southern border at 7:27 p.m., the asteroid 2023 BU will only be 2,200 miles above Earth’s surface. NASA states ET.
For comparison, that’s a little shorter than a straight-line trip from New York City to Las Vegas, which is about 2,230 miles through the air.
“In fact this is one the closest approaches by any known near-Earth objects ever recorded,” stated Davide Farnocchia (a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) as the agency announced that the close passage.
Even if the small asteroid did strike our planet, which scientists insist it will not, its main effect would still be visible. It would cause a fireball to our atmosphere and some debris would likely fall as small meteorites.
The asteroid will arrive on short notice: Gennadiy Borosov, a Crimean amateur astronomer, discovered 2023 BU on Saturday. He has previously been credited with discovering many comets and asteroids including the first confirmed interstellar camet.
NASA’s Scout System quickly found that 2023 BU would not hit Earth, but it “make an extraordinarily near approach”, according to Farnocchia who created the system.
The news of the impending visit comes at a moment when NASA is putting new emphasis on planetary defence, detecting and analysing objects that could pose an impacts hazard. It even tested an just-in-case plan for ramming an asteroid if necessary.
2023 BU is smaller than other close-passing asteroids. This asteroid is also closer than some other objects that are tens of thousands of miles from our planet.
The asteroid’s arrival will place it within the cloud geosynchronous satellites around Earth. This will allow the asteroid to get around 10 times closer than other objects that orbit in a high orbit.
