![]() ![]() The ESA's Hera mission, scheduled to launch next year to inspect the damage DART had on Dimorphos, could even be repurposed for reconnaissance if necessary, he added. With 23 years to prepare, there is "ample time" for such a mission to be planned, Moissl said. Last year, NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately slammed into the pyramid-sized asteroid Dimorphos, significantly knocking it off course in the first such test of our planetary defenses.įarnocchia said the "DART mission gives us confidence that such a mission would be successful" against 2023 DW, if required. While the Earth is still inside that uncertainty region, the odds temporarily increase-until further observations exclude Earth and the probability drops down to zero, as is expected to happen with 2023 DW.īut what would happen in the increasingly unlikely event that the asteroid does strike Earth?ĭavide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said a good comparison was the Tunguska event, in which a similarly-sized asteroid is believed to have exploded in the atmosphere above a sparsely populated area in Siberia in 1908.Įven if the asteroid is heading our way, the experts emphasized that the world is no longer defenseless against such a threat. This is because new observations shrink the "uncertainty region" where the asteroid will travel to on its closest point to Earth, he said. He said it was normal for the impact odds of newly discovered asteroids to briefly rise before rapidly falling. "We tend to be a little more conservative, but it definitely appears to now have a downward trend in probability," NASA's planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson told AFP. NASA on Tuesday lowered its own odds of impact to one in 770, meaning there was a 99.87 percent chance that the asteroid will miss Earth. "No one needs to be worried about this guy." "It will go down now with every observation until it reaches zero in a couple of days at the latest," he said. However Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA's planetary defense office, told AFP on Tuesday that overnight the probability fell to one in 1,584. ![]() Late last month the asteroid was given a one in 847 chance of hitting Earth-but the odds rose to one in 432 on Sunday, according to the ESA's risk list. It swiftly shot to the top of NASA and ESA lists of asteroids that pose a danger to Earth, leading to a raft of alarming news headlines, some warning lovers to cancel their Valentine's plans on February 14, 2046. Goldstone also collaborated with the 100-meter (330-foot) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to enable imaging of Apophis.The asteroid, which is named 2023 DW and is estimated to be around the size of a 50-meter Olympic swimming pool, was first spotted by a small Chilean observatory on February 26. The data for the study was gathered from the 70-meter (230-foot) radio antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California. With the recent findings, the Risk Table no longer includes Apophis. This greatly improved knowledge of its position in 2029 provides more certainty of its future motion, so we can now remove Apophis from the risk list.”įor this study, Farnocchia referred Sentry Impact Risk Table that continually scans the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth. With the support of recent optical observations and additional radar observations, the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit has collapsed from hundreds of kilometers to just a handful of kilometers when projected to 2029. When astronomers refined the estimate of its orbit around the Sun with extreme precision, the results confidently ruled out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.ĭavide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said, “A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility anymore, and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years. ![]() The asteroid was 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) away, and each pixel has a resolution of 127 feet (38.75 meters).Ĭredits: NASA/JPL-Caltech and NSF/AUI/GBO These images of asteroid Apophis were recorded by radio antennas at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex in California and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
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