Earth will have 'a very close encounter' with an asteroid tonight, NASA says - NPR

Asteroid 2023 BU volition streak astir 2,200 miles supra the Earth's aboveground connected Thursday night. Its way is seen present successful an representation from NASA's Scout interaction hazard appraisal system. The moon's way is successful gray. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

Asteroid 2023 BU volition streak astir 2,200 miles supra the Earth's aboveground connected Thursday night. Its way is seen present successful an representation from NASA's Scout interaction hazard appraisal system. The moon's way is successful gray.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

There's nary crushed to panic — an asteroid volition sprout past our satellite harmlessly Thursday night, NASA says. But still, the abstraction bureau says the entity — the size of a ample moving motortruck — volition marque 1 of the closest approaches to Earth ever erstwhile it zips implicit the Southern Hemisphere.

NASA describes it arsenic "a precise adjacent brushwood with our planet."

The asteroid, dubbed 2023 BU, volition beryllium lone 2,200 miles supra the Earth's aboveground erstwhile it passes implicit South America's confederate borderline astatine 7:27 p.m. ET, NASA says.

For comparison, that's a small shorter than a straight-line travel from New York City to Las Vegas, which is astir 2,230 miles through the air.

"In fact, this is 1 of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth entity ever recorded," said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation technologist astatine NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successful Southern California, arsenic the bureau announced the adjacent passage.

Even if it did deed our satellite — which it won't, scientists repetition — the tiny asteroid's main effect would beryllium visual, astatine it would go a fireball successful our atmosphere, with immoderate debris apt falling arsenic tiny meteorites.

The asteroid is arriving connected abbreviated notice: 2023 BU was conscionable discovered connected Saturday by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who has antecedently been credited with discovering a fig of comets and asteroids, including the archetypal confirmed interstellar comet.

NASA's Scout system, which assesses imaginable hazards, rapidly determined that 2023 BU wouldn't deed Earth but "make an extraordinarily adjacent approach," said Farnocchia, who developed the system.

News of the looming sojourn comes astatine a clip erstwhile NASA has enactment caller accent connected planetary defense, detecting and analyzing objects that could airs an interaction hazard. Last year, it adjacent tested a just-in-case plan to ram an asteroid, if it someday becomes indispensable to redirect an entity distant from Earth.

2023 BU is overmuch smaller than galore different close-passing asteroids that person made headlines successful caller years, one of which was "the size of 2 Rose Bowl stadiums." But this asteroid is besides coming overmuch person to our planet: immoderate of those different objects stayed tens oregon hundreds of thousands of miles away.

The asteroid's sojourn volition bring it good wrong the unreality of geosynchronous satellites astir Earth, getting astir 10 times person to the planet's aboveground than those objects, which maintain a precocious orbit.