NASA is Tracking a New Discovered Asteroid!

According to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, a newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046. The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of hitting Earth, according to data projections from the European Space Agency. But NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter monitors possible collisions with celestial bodies.

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Risk of Asteroid Impact

But the space rock, dubbed 2023 DW, is on NASA's risk list. It is the only object to rank 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale. Although 2023 DW tops the list, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a ranking of 1 only means that the probability of a collision is extremely low, with no cause for public attention or concern. A ranking of 0 stands for "probability." A collision is zero or so low as to be effectively zero.

"This object is not particularly relevant" said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA officials warned that as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analyses are conducted, the probability of an impact could change significantly. NASA Asteroid Watch on Twitter on Tuesday "Usually when new objects are first discovered, several weeks of data are required to reduce uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years later."