An asteroid that had a 1 in 600 chance of hitting our planet on Valentine's Day
Initially the Coordination Bureau of the PlanetaryNASA's Defense Department said there is a small but possible chance of an asteroid directly hitting Earth. The possible threat prompted a flurry of news reports asking readers to reconsider their romantic plans for Valentine's Day 2046. NASA has now revised this estimate, estimating the asteroid's chances of impacting Earth to be approximately 1 in 770. This means that the probability that 2023 DW will miss Earth is 99.87%.
Named the exact date of the possible fall of the asteroid to Earth
European Space Coordination CenterAgency (ESA) for Near-Earth Objects also reduced its risk assessment. According to the agency, the likelihood of exposure ranges from 1 in 625 to about 1 in 1,584.
“Now the likelihood of a collision will decreasewith each new observation until it reaches zero, at the latest in a couple of days. There's no need to worry about this guy,” Richard Moissle, head of ESA's planetary defense office, told Agence France-Presse.
NASA tracks locations and orbits of approximately28,000 asteroids, studying their locations using the ATLAS collision warning system. It consists of four telescopes that scan the night sky every 24 hours. The agency marks any space object that approaches Earth within 193 million km as a “near-Earth object” and classifies all large asteroids within 7.5 million km of our planet as “potentially hazardous.”
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