Asteroid 2023 BU will streak about 2,200 miles above the Earth’s floor on Thursday evening. Its path is seen right here in a picture from NASA’s Scout affect hazard evaluation system. The moon’s path is in grey.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

Asteroid 2023 BU will streak about 2,200 miles above the Earth’s floor on Thursday evening. Its path is seen right here in a picture from NASA’s Scout affect hazard evaluation system. The moon’s path is in grey.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

There’s no motive to panic — an asteroid will shoot previous our planet harmlessly Thursday evening, NASA says. But nonetheless, the area company says the article — the scale of a big shifting truck — will make one of many closest approaches to Earth ever when it zips over the Southern Hemisphere.

NASA describes it as “a very close encounter with our planet.”

The asteroid, dubbed 2023 BU, will probably be solely 2,200 miles above the Earth’s floor when it passes over South America’s southern edge at 7:27 p.m. ET, NASA says.

For comparability, that is a little bit shorter than a straight-line journey from New York City to Las Vegas, which is about 2,230 miles through the air.

“In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” mentioned Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, because the company announced the close passage.

Even if it did hit our planet — which it will not, scientists repeat — the small asteroid’s foremost impact could be visible, at it could turn into a fireball in our environment, with some particles doubtless falling as small meteorites.

The asteroid is arriving on quick discover: 2023 BU was simply found on Saturday by Crimean newbie astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who has beforehand been credited with discovering a number of comets and asteroids, together with the primary confirmed interstellar comet.

NASA’s Scout system, which assesses potential hazards, shortly decided that 2023 BU would not hit Earth however “make an extraordinarily close approach,” mentioned Farnocchia, who developed the system.

News of the looming go to comes at a time when NASA has put new emphasis on planetary protection, detecting and analyzing objects that would pose an affect hazard. Last yr, it even tested a just-in-case plan to ram an asteroid, if it sometime turns into essential to redirect an object away from Earth.

2023 BU is way smaller than many different close-passing asteroids which have made headlines in recent times, one of which was “the size of two Rose Bowl stadiums.” But this asteroid can also be coming a lot nearer to our planet: a few of these different objects stayed tens or lots of of hundreds of miles away.

The asteroid’s go to will deliver it nicely throughout the cloud of geosynchronous satellites round Earth, getting round 10 occasions nearer to the planet’s floor than these objects, which maintain a high orbit.