26-01-23, 18:40
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Asteroid The Size of a BUS Coming as Close to Earth as London to Cairo Tonight
Asteroid The Size of a BUS Coming as Close to Earth as London to Cairo Tonight
The asteroid, known as 2023 BU, will zoom 2,200 miles above the southern tip of South America - 10 times closer than most communication satellites circling overhead, and around the same distance as the UK to Cyprus
BBC 26 JAN 2023
Asteroid 2023 BU Closest Approaches Ever!
An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will pass Earth in one of the closest such encounters ever recorded – coming within a tenth of the distance of most communication satellites’ orbit.
Nasa said the newly discovered asteroid would pass 2,200 miles (3,600km) above the southern tip of South America at 7.27pm US eastern time on Thursday (12.27am GMT on Friday).
Nasa said it would be a near miss with no chance of hitting Earth. Even if it came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.
the unmanned Hayabusa craft makes a flight to Itokawa
Space dust from 4.2bn-year-old asteroid could hold key to preventing cataclysmic collisions with Earth
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 fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
Discovered on Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is believed to be between 11ft (3.5m) and 28ft (8.5m) across.
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