NASA: Asteroid could collide with Earth in 2046

It’s not as dramatic as the plot of Michael Bay’s 1998 sci-fi film Armageddon, but NASA scientists say a newly discovered asteroid could potentially crash into Earth on Valentine’s Day 2046.

The chance of an asteroid is 0.18 percent, or one in 560, about colliding with Earth that day. The space rock is about 49.29 meters in diameter, or the size of two tennis courts, and orbits the Sun every 271 days.

The asteroid, which NASA calls 2023 DW, is currently cataloged Turin exposure hazard scale, which measures exposure risk. The scale ranges from zero to 10, with zero meaning a chance of hitting Earth and 10 meaning a catastrophic collision.

According to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the Turin-sized asteroid is “a routine discovery with a predicted near-Earth pass that does not pose an unusual level of hazard.”

CNEOS says current calculations show the chance of an asteroid hitting Earth is “extremely unlikely without public attention or cause for public concern” and further observations will likely lead scientists to reset the probability of an impact to 0.

2023 DW has nine other chances to collide with Earth, but NASA estimates there is at least a 99.99 percent chance it will miss in all of those cases.

“We tracked a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046. Often, when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks to reduce uncertainties and predict their orbits for years. future,” NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office said on Tuesday from its @AsteroidWatch Twitter account.

“Orbital analysts will continue to monitor the 2023 DW asteroid and update predictions as more data becomes available.”

About 10 years ago, A meteorite roughly the size of an SUV has exploded in central Russia injuring about 1,000 people and causing a loss of about 33 million US dollars.