A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth on Valentine's Day 23 years from now, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
The space rock, named 2023 DW, has a 1 in 625 chance of striking our planet, based on data projections from the European Space Agency (ESA). But NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry System - which tracks potential collisions with celestial objects - calculated the odds close to 1 in 560.
The asteroid, with a 50-meter diameter (about 160 feet), is at the number one spot on ESA's "Risk List" of space objects that have a greater than zero probability of making an impact on Earth. It is also the only space rock on that list that scored a 1 on the Torino scale, which is used to categorise the risk of impact to the Earth level. All others have 0 ratings.
As per Jet Propulsion Laboratory, level 1 indicates the "chance of collision is extremely unlikely with no cause for public attention or public concern". "This object is not particularly concerning," said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as per CNN.
Further, the US space agency officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed. NASA stated that the 2023 DW has "a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046".
"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," said NASA Asteroid Watch wrote in Twitter post.
Also Read | For The First Time, Curiosity Rover From NASA Discovers "Sun Rays" On Mars
Separately, NASA's Eyes on Asteroids noted that as 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers).
Notably, the space rock was first spotted on February 2. It's travelling about 25 kilometres per second at a distance of more than 18 million kilometres from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.
