A delivery truck-sized asteroid passed near Earth on Thursday night in one of the closest such approaches to our planet ever recorded, NASA said, in a near miss that ultimately posed no danger.
NASA said Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid would zoom 3,600 kilometers (2,200 miles) above the southern tip of South America. That's 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling overhead.
The closest approach occurred at 7:27 p.m. EST (12:27 a.m. GMT).
Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some more significant pieces possibly falling as meteorites.
NASA's impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"But despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth," Farnocchia said in a statement. "This is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded."
Discovered Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is believed to be between 3.5 meters (11 feet) and 8.5 meters feet across. It was first spotted by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered an interstellar comet in 2019. Within a few days, dozens of observations were made by astronomers around the world, allowing them to refine the asteroid's orbit.
Earth's gravity drastically altered the asteroid's path once it zipped by. Instead of circling the sun every 359 days, it now moved into an oval orbit lasting 425 days, according to NASA.
