London bus-sized asteroid to fly close to Earth by midnight

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London bus-sized asteroid to fly close to Earth by midnight

A huge asteroid in the size of a London bus will narrowly fly within 2,100 miles (3,400 km) of Earth at tomorrow’s midnight which is going to be the fourth closest recorded approach to the planet.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that discovered the asteroid known as 2023 BU, will zoom above the southern tip of South America – nearly the same distance as the UK to Cyprus, or London to Cairo.

According to NASA, that occurrence will be 10 times closer than the horde of communication satellites circling overhead, adding that the closest approach will occur at 12.27 am GMT (7:27 pm EST), according to the space agency.

Even if the space rock came to 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 on Saturday, the asteroid is believed to be between 11ft (3.5 metres) and 28ft (8.5 metres) across

It was initially 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.