An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will fly past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest encounters ever recorded.
NASA insists it will be an accident with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth.
NASA said Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid will zoom 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) above the southern tip of South America. That’s 10 times closer than the bevy of communications satellites circling overhead.
Closest approach will occur at 7:27 pm EST (9:27 pm local.)
Even if the space rock is closer, scientists say most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the larger pieces likely to become meteorites.
NASA’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly rejected the attack, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“However, despite some observations, it is possible to predict that an asteroid will make a very close approach to Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches to a near-Earth object ever recorded.”
Discovered on Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is believed to be between 11 feet (3.5 meters) and 28 feet (8.5 meters) across. It was first discovered by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered the interstellar comet in 2019. In a few days, dozens of observations were made by astronomers around the world, in order to refine the asteroid’s orbit.
An asteroid’s trajectory will be drastically altered by Earth’s gravity once it passes by. Instead of orbiting the sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit that lasts 425 days, according to NASA.
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