Asteroid the size of delivery truck to come ‘extraordinarily close’ to Earth on Friday

An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will whip past Earth on Friday morning, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.

NASA insists it will be a near miss and nothing more, with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth.

The space agency said on Wednesday that the newly discovered asteroid would make its closest approach on Friday at 11:27am AEDT, zooming past about 3,600 kilometres above the southern tip of South America.

That is 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling above the Earth.

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,” Dr Farnocchia said.

Discovered on Saturday, the asteroid — known as 2023 BU — is believed to be between 3.5 metres and 8.5 metres wide.

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 their understanding of 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.

AP