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It’s traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.įarnocchia noted the success of NASA’s DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, in September 2022 as evidence that humanity can be prepared to confront space rocks on potentially disastrous courses. The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2.
The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids website notes. 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 20. The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. Newly discovered asteroid makes one of the closest approaches of Earth “But then the object will remain observable for weeks (even months with larger telescopes) so we can get plenty of observations as needed,” he added.
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The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation, he said. It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid’s proximity to the moon, Farnocchia noted in an email to CNN. “Most often, the threat associated with a specific object will decrease as additional observations become available.” “However, such early predictions can often be ruled out as we incorporate more observations and reduce the uncertainties in the object’s orbit,” it reads. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies Most often, the threat associated with a specific object will decrease as additional observations become available. “Because orbits stemming from very limited observation sets are more uncertain it is more likely that such orbits will ‘permit’ future impacts,” the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, notes on its website. It’s common for newly discovered asteroids to appear more threatening when first observed. “Often when new objects are first discovered,” NASA Asteroid Watch noted Tuesday on Twitter, “it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future.” NASA 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.
“This object is not particularly concerning,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Though the 2023 DW tops the list, its ranking of 1 means only that “the chance of collision is extremely unlikely with no cause for public attention or public concern,” according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, while a 0 ranking means the “likelihood of a collision is zero, or is so low as to be effectively zero.” All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale. Video: Meteor, meteorite, asteroid, comet: What's the difference?īut the space rock - named 2023 DW - is the only object on NASA’s risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth.
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