Asteroid 2023 BU will pass about 2,200 miles above the Earth’s surface on Thursday night. That path can be seen here in an image from NASA’s Scout Collision Hazard Assessment System. The moon road is gray.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
Asteroid 2023 BU will pass about 2,200 miles above the Earth’s surface on Thursday night. That path can be seen here in an image from NASA’s Scout Collision Hazard Assessment System. The moon road is gray.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
There’s no reason to panic — an asteroid will pass harmlessly past our planet Thursday night, NASA says. Still, the space agency says the object, about the size of a moving lorry, will be one of the closest to Earth as it passes over the Southern Hemisphere.
NASA explain it as “a very close encounter with our planet”.
The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will be just 2,200 miles above Earth’s surface when it passes over the southern tip of South America at 7:27 p.m. ET, NASA said.
By comparison, this is a little less than the approximately 2,230-mile straight-line trip from New York City to Las Vegas. through the air.
“In fact, this is one of the closest encounters by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. announced menopause.
Even if it did hit our planet, scientists repeat, the main effect of a small asteroid would be visual, fireballs in the atmosphere, and the possibility of some debris falling as small meteorites. there is.
Asteroids arrive soon: 2023 BU was discovered on Saturday by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Discovered many comets and asteroidsincluding the first confirmed interstellar comet.
NASA scout systemEvaluate potential hazards.
News of the impending visit comes as NASA puts renewed emphasis on planetary defense, detecting and analyzing objects that could pose a collision hazard. last year too Tested the plan just in case Hitting an asteroid if one day it becomes necessary to move an object away from Earth.
2023 BU is much smaller than many other close-passing asteroids that have attracted attention in recent years. one of them is “It’s the size of two Rose Bowl stadiums.” But the asteroid is also approaching our planet. Some of these other objects stayed tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Asteroid visits are well into the cloud of geostationary satellites around Earth, about 10 times closer to the planet’s surface than those objects. maintain high trajectory.
