A small, truck-sized asteroid that suddenly burst out of the darkness a few days ago with Earth in its sights passed us without doing any damage on Thursday, NASA said. It approached 3600 km from the earth’s surface.
Contrary to what has been seen many times in Hollywood movies, no global mission to blow it up or deflect it off course with missiles was required. Instead, asteroid 2023 BU passed without incident before heading back into the darkness of space.
The object, first spotted on Saturday from an observatory in Crimea, came closest to the southern tip of South America around 1:29 a.m. Friday (Swiss time), according to scientists tracking it.
At its closest point, 3600 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, it was much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet.
It was amateur astronomer Gennady Borissov, the discoverer of the interstellar comet Borissov in 2019, who sounded the alarm on Saturday. Dozens of observations were then made by observatories around the world, confirming the arrival of 2023 BU.
NASA’s impact risk assessment system, Scout, quickly ruled out a collision with Earth. “Despite the very few sightings, he was nevertheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach to Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which developed Scout.
This is “one of the closest approaches by an NEO [un astéroïde ou une comète dont l’orbite croise celle de la Terre, ndlr] never recorded”, he adds.
If the calculations had been wrong, however, humanity would probably have been fine, scientists say. The asteroid, which measures between 3.5 and 8.5 meters in diameter, would have largely disintegrated in our atmosphere, potentially only dropping some debris in the form of small meteorites.
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