Watch as bus-sized asteroid ‘2023 BU’ zips past Earth
NASA says the encounter marked one of the closest approaches of a near-Earth object ever recorded.
Asteroid 2023 BU passes Earth
Gianluca Masi at the Virtual Telescope Project recorded this footage of asteroid 2023 BU as it zoomed past Earth on Jan. 26, 2023.
Astronomers in Europe were able to grab footage of an asteroid the size of a school bus as it flew past Earth on Thursday.
NASA said the asteroid, called "2023 BU," was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov in Nauchnyi, Crimea, last weekend. Scientists started making observations after that, and the Scout impact hazard system determined the space rock would miss our planet by a hair – 2,200 miles above Earth’s surface to be exact.
On Thursday, 2023 BU flew over the southern tip of South America. Astronomer Gianluca Masi at the Virtual Telescope Project was able to record a series of images as the 11.5-feet-by-28-feet rock streaked across the sky.
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An arrow indicates the position of asteroid 2023 BU in this image taken by the Virtual Telescope Project on Jan. 26, 2023.
(Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope Project / FOX Weather)
"The telescope tracked the very fast apparent motion of the asteroid," Masi wrote on the project’s website. "This is why stars look like long trails while the asteroid is a bright, sharp dot of light."
According to Masi, he had to battle cloudy skies to get the shots of 2023 BU. He said the rock was about 23,000 miles away from Earth when the images were taken and was still approaching its closest point to the planet.
"This made it the 4th closest asteroid ever," Masi wrote.
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This orbital diagram from CNEOS’s close approach viewer shows 2023 BU’s trajectory – in red – during its close approach with Earth on Jan. 26, 2023. The asteroid will pass about 10 times closer to Earth than the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, shown in green line.
(JPL-Caltech / NASA)
NASA scientists said 2023 BU’s orbit was changed by its encounter with Earth. The asteroid’s circular orbit of the sun, which took 359 days to complete, has now become elongated and will take about 425 days to complete.