Tech

An Asteroid Will Make One of the Closest Passes to Earth In History Today

But don't freak out.
An Asteroid Will Make One of the Closest Passes to Earth In History Today
Image: NASA

An asteroid about the size of a moving truck is about to pass within 2,200 miles of the Earth’s surface, making it one of the closest approaches of a space rock to our planet ever recorded, according to NASA. 

Asteroid 2023 BU, which is estimated to be anywhere from 11.5 to 28 feet long, will swoop over the southern tip of Chile at 7:27 pm EST on Thursday at an altitude that is well below the orbits of many satellites. The asteroid poses no threat to life on Earth; even if it were on a collision course with our planet—which it is not—it would break apart in the atmosphere, leaving only small meteorites to fall to the surface.

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Small asteroids skim within several thousand miles of Earth fairly frequently, and they occasionally do impact and leave scattered remains on our planet. These close encounters affect the asteroids far more than the asteroids affect Earth, as our planet’s gravity tends to fling small rocks into new orbits. After its pass later today, asteroid 2023 BU is expected to be catapulted from its roughly circular orbit of 359 days into a new elongated orbit that will extend its year to 425 days.

Though the asteroid is not hazardous, its discovery and rapid characterization is an example of the sophisticated detection network that scientists have developed to defend Earth from dangerous space objects. 

Asteroid 2023 BU was spotted on January 21 by Gennadiy Borisov, an amateur astronomer based in Nauchnyi, Crimea who previously achieved widespread recognition when he discovered the first known interstellar comet in 2019, which now bears his name.

In the days following Borisov’s discovery, several observations of the asteroid were reported to Minor Planet Center, a branch of the International Astronomical Union that monitors small space objects, which confirmed the detection. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) determined that the asteroid would not hit Earth using its “Scout” computer program, which assesses the risk of impacts.

“Scout quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”