A small asteroid grazes Earth tonight without danger

2023-BU is between 3.5 and 8.5 meters in diameter, according to the astronomers, or about the size of a bus, depending on how many people you put on the bus. Nice pebble, sure, but it’s a small pebble by gauge asteroids. Lucky for us, because it’s about to graze the land. The report said that the asteroid 2023-BU, which was recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will pass near the southern tip of South America around 0:27 GMT on Friday. NASA In a press release.

It will pass only 3,600 kilometers from Earth’s surface, which is much closer than many of the geostationary satellites orbiting the planet. But there is no danger The asteroid hits the Earthconfirmed by the US Space Agency. And even if it did, it would mostly disintegrate in our atmosphere, likely dropping a few pieces of debris in the form of small meteorites.

A lane that would slow down the asteroid

The object was spotted on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, discoverer of the 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 the impact on Earth. “Despite very few sightings, he was still able to predict that the asteroid would come unusually close to Earth,” said David Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the Scouts.

This is “one of the closest approaches to a near-Earth object (an asteroid or comet whose orbit crosses an orbit). a land) has not been recorded, ”he adds. The asteroid will come so close to the blue planet that Earth’s gravity is expected to change its orbit around the planet sun. Before it arrived, it took 359 days for the asteroid to orbit our star. It will now need 425, according to NASA.