Footage Shows Near-Miss Earth Flyby of Asteroid 2023 BU

An astronomer has managed to capture footage of asteroid “2023 BU” flying near Earth,narrowly missingour planet during Thursday’s flyby.

The footage comes from Gianluca Masi, who runs “The Virtual Telescope(Opens in a new window),” a set of real robotic telescopes through which internet users can view the cosmos. Masi pointed one of the telescopes at the asteroid on Thursday afternoon PST about two hours before 2023 BU was about to make its closest approach to Earth at a distance of 2,200 miles.

“This made it the fourth closest asteroid (approach) ever,” Masiwrote(Opens in a new window)in a blog post. It was so close that the asteroid was briefly nearer to Earth than geosynchronous satellites fly.

The image above was taken when the asteroid was still about 23,000 miles away from Earth. “Imaging it was not easy because the sky was cloudy for most of the time, so we had to delay ourlive feed(Opens in a new window)many times,” he wrote. “But we were lucky: at some point the sky improved and, while it was far from being decent, we could spot and track this rock.”

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Masi was also able to compile the images together to create a video of the asteroid flying through the night sky.

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Any close approach of an asteroid can be unsettling. Fortunately, NASA says 2023 BU’s size is comparable to a box truck and measures 11.5 to 28 feet across. Hence, the asteroid is small enough that if it did collide with our planet, it’d likely burn up in the atmosphere before causing any damage. In contrast, an asteroid at least one to two kilometers in size could cause significant damage to our planet. Even larger ones could end human civilization.

According(Opens in a new window)to NASA’s asteroid tracker, 2023 BU has now flown past the orbit of the Moon. The rock will continue traveling along on an elongated orbit around our Sun.