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- By Brandon Drenon
- BBC News, Washington
Asteroid 2023 DW has a greater probability of hitting a date of 14 February than our planet, NASA says.
A newly detected asteroid has a really small probability of impacting the Earth in 2046, Nasa tweeted on Tuesday.
If it does hit, the asteroid, roughly the scale of an Olympic swimming pool, might arrive on Valentine’s Day 2046 in response to Nasa calculations.
The closest the asteroid is predicted to get to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8m km), Nasa says.
But researchers are nonetheless gathering information, which they are saying might change predictions.
The asteroid, dubbed 2023 DW, has a couple of 1 in 560 probability of hitting Earth, in response to Nasa. It’s the one area rock on Nasa’s threat record that ranks a 1 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale.
The scale, which matches from 0-10, measures the chance of area objects colliding with Earth. All different objects on the size rank 0, indicating no threat for influence.
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A rating of 1 implies that an precise collision is extraordinarily unlikely and no trigger for public concern, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) says.
“This object is not particularly concerning,” JPL navigation engineer Davide Farnocchia told CNN.
If it does collide with us, 2023 DW wouldn’t have the identical doomsday impact because the asteroid that decimated the Earth’s dinosaurs 66 million years in the past. That asteroid was far larger at 7.5 miles (12km) extensive, Scientific American says.
But an influence from 2023 DW might nonetheless trigger important injury if it had been to land atop a significant metropolis or densely populated space. A meteor lower than half the scale of 2023 DW exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, 10 years in the past, inflicting a shock wave that blew out home windows throughout 200 sq. miles and injured roughly 1,500 folks.
While contact with an asteroid appears unlikely, scientists have been making ready for such an encounter for years. Last October, Nasa confirmed the company’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission had efficiently modified the journey path of a small asteroid by slamming a spacecraft into it.
“That’s the very reason why we flew that mission,” Mr Farnocchia mentioned, “and that mission was a spectacular success.”
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