A recently found asteroid will make one of the planet Earth's closest recorded flyby tonight

 By Ashley Strickland

January 26, 2023

(CNN) - One of the planet Earth's closest recorded encounters with an asteroid the size of a box truck is going to occur.

At 7:27 p.m. ET on Thursday, the small near-Earth asteroid 2023 BU will fly over the southernmost point of South America at a height of about 2,200 miles (3,540 kilometres). Global satellites can easily fit inside this range in their orbit.

According to NASA, there is no chance that the asteroid will hit Earth.

The space rock, which is thought to measure 11.5 to 28 feet (3.5 to 8.5 metres) broad, would become a fireball once it hit the atmosphere and then disintegrate if it did decide to aim for Earth. The space agency predicted that any leftover debris would become tiny meteorites and hit the ground.

Gennadiy Borisov, an amateur astronomer, discovered the asteroid on Saturday from the MARGO observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea. The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was first detected by Borisov in 2019.

Recent reports of sightings of the asteroid 2023 BU were also sent to the Small Planet Center, which keeps track of the locations of minor planets, comets, and space rocks. When sufficient observations had been gathered, the centre made the asteroid's discovery public. Such celestial objects' identification, naming, and orbital information are handled by the organisation under the authority of the International Astronomical Union.

Following the discovery's announcement on Sunday, more observations were taken by observatories all across the world, enabling the orbit of 2023 BU to be precisely adjusted.

The data from the Minor Planet Center were assessed by the Scout impact hazard assessment system at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which made the prediction that the asteroid would avoid Earth.

All known near-Earth asteroids have their trajectories calculated by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to determine their possible effect on Earth.

The asteroid 2023 BU was swiftly ruled out as an impactor, but Scout was still able to foresee that it would come quite near to Earth, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL and the creator of Scout. In actuality, this is among the reported closest encounters of a known near-Earth asteroid.

Asteroid 2023 BU will approach our planet so closely that its orbit around the sun will change as a result of the encounter. Normally, asteroids' trajectories are altered by the gravity of Earth.

The asteroid had a circular orbit around the sun that took approximately 359 days to complete before Thursday's near approach. After then, according to estimates made by experts, the asteroid would prolong its orbit, making the length of the sun's single orbit 425 days.

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