MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. Russia’s Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics has published a photograph of an asteroid, named 2023 BU, projected to fly just 3,600 km above South America in the early hours of Friday.

"The dim line in the middle of this image is the near-earth asteroid 2023 BU, whose image was taken just now, by the 36-centimeter telescope of the ISON-Kitab observatory," the scientists said on Thursday evening.

"At the time this image was taken, this tiny piece of space rock, measuring around 4-8 meters, was about 100,000 km away from our planet, but it will fly just 3,600 km away from the surface of the Earth above South America in less than seven hours," they said.

This flyby will be ranked fourth in the list of closest approaches of asteroids, following three other tiny asteroids that were observed in 2020-2021.