Asteroid 2023 BU to pass Earth in one of the closest approaches ever recorded

Seren Morris
·2-min read
This orbital diagram from Nasa shows 2023 BU’s trajectory — in red — during its close approach with Earth on January 26, 2023. The asteroid will pass about 10 times closer to Earth than the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, shown in the green line (Nasa/JPL-Caltech)
This orbital diagram from Nasa shows 2023 BU’s trajectory — in red — during its close approach with Earth on January 26, 2023. The asteroid will pass about 10 times closer to Earth than the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, shown in the green line (Nasa/JPL-Caltech)

An asteroid around the size of a small lorry will pass Earth in one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.

Nasa said asteroid 2023 BU would come within a tenth of the distance of most communication satellites’ orbit at 7.27pm US eastern time on Thursday (12.37am GMT on Friday).

The space agency said the asteroid would pass over the southern tip of South America at only 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface.

It said there was no risk of the asteroid hitting Earth, however. Even if it came a lot closer, scientists said it would turn into a fireball and disintegrate in the atmosphere.

If this were to happen, some of the bigger debris could fall as small meteorites.

Amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov discovered the asteroid on January 21, from Nauchnyi, Crimea, a peninsula in Ukraine.

Nasa’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, then predicted that it would be a near-miss.

Nasa launches DART spacecraft mission to deflect asteroid in planetary defence test

(NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
(NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (AP)
The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (AP)
(AP)
(AP)
(Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab/Nasa/PA)
(Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab/Nasa/PA)
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft onboard from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft onboard from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
(PA Graphics)
(PA Graphics)
(AP)
(AP)
(PA Graphics)
(PA Graphics)
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft onboard, Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA launched the spacecraft Tuesday night on the DART mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth (AP)

“Scout quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” said Scout’s developer, Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”

The asteroid took 359 days to orbit the sun. After it encounters Earth, it will then move between its and Mars’s orbits at the furthest point from the sun. It will complete one orbit every 425 days.

Nasa said earlier this month that in 2022, it had discovered a number of near-Earth objects and that none of them pose a threat.

Also on January 26, another car-sized asteroid, named 2023 BL2, will pass Earth from 230,000 miles away.

An airplane-sized asteroid named 2020 BZ14 will also pass at around 2,100,000 miles away.

After 2023 BU passes Earth, two more asteroids the size of airplanes, 2023 BC and 2022 SO113, will pass at distances of 1,760,000 and 2,500,000, respectively.

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