An asteroid travelling at 33,300 miles per hour is on course to narrowly miss Earth at around 12.30am UK time on Friday morning. The space rock, which has been named 2023 BU, will be the fourth-nearest of 35,000 past and future Earth approaches according to data collected by Nasa's Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) for the 300 years from 1900 to 2200.
And you will be able to watch the asteroid whiz past our planet on a livestream courtesy of robotic, remote-controlled telescopes as part of the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) that is being operated by the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Ceccano, Italy. The asteroid is set to pass Earth at an altitude of approximately 2,500 miles above the ground which, in astronomical terms, represents a tiny distance.
To put it into context, the approach is so close that it is less than three per cent of the average distance between Earth and the moon. Astronomers only detected 2023 BU at the weekend but have confirmed that there is no chance of a collision with our planet.
