The European Space Agency confirmed yesterday (March 14) that the odds of a newly-discovered asteroid hitting earth on Valentine's Day 2046 have fallen dramatically, Geo News reports. The asteroid, named 2023 DW, has an estimated size of around a 50-metre Olympic swimming pool, and was spotted for the first time at a small Chilean observatory on February 26.
It rocketed to the top of Nasa and ESA lists of the most threatening asteroids to Earth. The news triggered plenty of concerning news headlines, while others took the more humorous approach of warning lovers to cancel their plans for Valentine's Day 2046.
The asteroid was given a one in 847 chance of making contact with Earth late last month, however odds worryingly rose even further to one in 432 on Sunday (March 12) on the ESA's risk list. Similar but not identical estimations were made by Nasa.
Reassuringly, head of the ESA's planetary defence office Richard Moissl confirmed on Tuesday that the probability had fallen to one in 1,584. He said: "It will go down now with every observation until it reaches zero in a couple of days at the latest. No one needs to be worried about this guy."
Lindsey Johnson, Nasa's planetary defence office, concurred, telling AFP that "at this point, no one should be concerned at all". He added that it was not out of the ordinary for impact odds of newly discovered asteroids to initially rise before reaching a peak and plummeting down.
He said that new observations reduce the "uncertainty region" of where exactly in the atmosphere the asteroid will travel, and how close it is to Earth. Despite the Earth still being in that "region", the likelihood temporarily increases, before more observations eliminates Earth from concern, and the probability decreases down to zero, which is precisely what is anticipated to happen with 2023 DW.
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