NASA on alert for asteroid that has 1-in-600 chance of hitting Earth on Valentine’s Day 2046

 

 

Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in, the agency added.

What is Megha-Tropiques-1 and why is India crashing it today?

The asteroid is also on the top of the risk list developed by the European Space Agency for near-Earth objects with a 1-in-625 chance of impact. There are less than 1,500 objects in the agency’s risk list which keeps a track of objects which have a non-zero chance of hitting the Earth.

The 165-foot wide asteroid is far from the size of the 12-km wide asteroid whose cataclysmic impact on Earth wiped out dinosaurs along with 75 percent of all animal and plant life on the planet. But the asteroid is still large enough to cause serious damage especially if it impacts near densely populated areas like a large city.

While asteroids will always remain a distant but existential threat to life on Earth, NASA’s recent success in the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission has given a new way to deal with possible asteroid threats. The mission highlighted the fact that NASA could change the trajectory of deadly asteroids on a collision course with the Earth by ramming it with a satellite, which would slow down or throw off the trajectory of the asteroid just enough that it would miss the planet.

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