Near-Earth Asteroid 2023 BU extremely close encounter: a image – 24 Jan. 2023
On 27 Jan. 2023, the near-Earth asteroid 2023 BU will have an extremely close, but safe encounter with our Earth, coming as close as 10.000 km from its center. We captured it while it was approaching us.
Near-Earth Asteroid 2023 BU: 24 Jan. 2023.
The image above comes from a single, 300-second exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″ + Paramount ME + SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars look like long trails while the asteroid is a sharp dot of light.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2023 BU was at about 580.000 km from us and was approaching our planet. The minimum distance (10.000 km, less than 3% of the average lunar distance, 1/4 of the distance of geostationary satellites) will be reached on 27 Jan. at 00:26 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). It will fly about 3.600 km above the Earth’s surface: this makes it the 4th closest asteroid ever (excluding those – five – discovered just before their impact).
This 3.8 – 8.4 meters large asteroid (source: Nasa/JPL) was discovered by G. Borisov on 21 Jan. 2023 and announced the following day. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
We scheduled a live feed to show it in real-time!
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