West News Wire: According to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, it has been monitoring the new asteroid 2023 DW, which has “a very modest possibility” of colliding with Earth on February 14th, 2046.
The European Space Agency predicts that the asteroid will collide with Earth one in 625 times, whereas the Sentry system of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory predicts a collision one in 560 times.
The only object that scientists are monitoring and that has a ranking on the Torino scale, which NASA uses to classify potential Earth-impact scenarios, is an asteroid. The chances of the space rock hitting the globe, according to the US space agency, are incredibly remote.
“Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future,” NASA tweeted. “Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in.”
First detected in February, the asteroid is estimated to have an average diameter of 49 metres (160 feet) or roughly the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
According to NASA, the asteroid is predicted to have 10 close approaches to Earth with the other nine occurring between 2047 and 2054.
In September 2022, NASA crashed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or DART, into an asteroid to see if it could prevent potentially devastating collisions with Earth. Later NASA confirmed the mission was a success.
