There’s no need to start singing Aerosmith* but an asteroid due to fly past Earth is going to get really close tomorrow.
NASA *SWEARS* the delivery-truck-sized asteroid will not hit us — but it will be one of the closest encounters ever recorded.
The asteroid named 2023 BU will zoom 3600 kms above the southern tip of South America.
That’s 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling overhead.
The closest approach will occur about 8.20am AWST.
Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger 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.
“In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
Discovered Saturday, 2023 BU is believed to be between 3.5 meters and 8.5 meters 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.
The asteroid’s path will be drastically altered by Earth’s gravity once it zips by.
Instead of circling the sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit lasting 425 days, according to NASA.
*A reference to the 1998 classic film Armageddon starring Aerosmith lead singer Steve Tyler’s daughter Liv and Bruce Willis.
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