NASA: Asteroid will come close to Earth Thursday but will miss

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will crash past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.

NASA confirmed this would be a near miss and there was no possibility of the asteroid hitting Earth.

NASA said Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid will zoom 2,200 miles (3,600 km) above the southern tip of South America. That’s almost 10 times as far as the series of communication satellites circling overhead.

The closest approach will occur at 7:27 p.m. EST (9:27 p.m. local time.)

Even as the space rock gets closer, scientists say most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, with some larger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.

Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said NASA’s impact risk assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike.

“However, despite very few observations, it can still be predicted that this asteroid will make an unusually close approach to Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. object has been recorded.

Discovered Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is thought to be between 11 feet (3.5 meters) and 28 feet (8.5 meters) in diameter. It was first discovered by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered an interstellar comet in 2019. Within a few days, dozens of observations were made by astronomers. astronomers around the world do, allowing them to fine-tune the asteroid’s orbit.

The asteroid’s path will be dramatically altered by Earth’s gravity as it passes. According to NASA, instead of orbiting the sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit that lasts 425 days.