(Los Angeles) 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.
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 Saturday from an observatory in Crimea, made the closest approach to the southern tip of South America around 7:29 p.m. EST Friday, according to scientists who were following him.
At its closest point, the asteroid was 3,600 kilometers from Earth’s surface, 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 still 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, editor’s note) ever 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.
According to NASA officials, Earth’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun. Before his arrival, he needed 359 days to go around our star. It will now need 425, according to NASA.