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Ciel!Look at the asteroid that will graze the Earth!
This Thursday evening, 2023 BU will approach our planet as rarely a celestial object has done, passing only 3600 km from us. Break out the telescopes or hit the web!
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- Michel Pralong with AFP
This diagram shows the trajectory of 2023 BU, 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, represented in green.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Five days ago, on January 21, an amateur astronomer, Gennadi Borissov, in Crimea, spotted a new asteroid, 2023 BU. The particularity of this pebble, whose size is estimated between 3.5 and 8.5 meters, is that it will graze our planet at the closest distance ever seen for 300 years. But even if he will be very close, we risk nothing.
The asteroid will pass just 3,600 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, much closer than many geostationary satellites orbiting the planet, says the NASA. It will indeed be between low Earth orbit (2000 km) and geostationary orbit (36,000 km), hurtling at 32,400 km/h.
Impact exclu
It will continue on its course without touching us, but even if it had headed straight for us, the asteroid would largely disintegrate in our atmosphere, potentially only dropping some debris in the form of small meteorites. Asteroids less than 25 meters wide are indeed all disintegrated in the atmosphere.
It was the same Gennady Borissov who discovered the interstellar comet Borissov in 2019. Dozens of observations of BU 2023 were then made by observatories around the world, confirming its arrival. NASA’s impact risk assessment system, Scout, quickly ruled out impact with Earth. “Despite the very few sightings, it 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.
It is “one of the closest approaches by a near-Earth object (an asteroid or a comet whose orbit crosses that of the Earth) ever recorded”, he adds. The asteroid will come so close to the blue planet that Earth’s gravity is expected to alter its orbit around the Sun. Before its arrival, it took 359 days for the asteroid to go around our star. It will now need 425, according to NASA.
To follow live
It should be visible from our home around 10:17 p.m., especially with telescopes, weather permitting. ON can also follow it live on the European Virtual Telescope Project channel from 8:15 p.m.