NASA tracking asteroid that has potential to hit Earth in 2046

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day each year? Well, you might want to circle that day in 2046, because NASA's Planetary Defense Office is tracking a new asteroid that has a very small chance of hitting Earth in 23 years. Joining me now is David Farnochia. He's a navigation engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. David, I thank you so much for joining us. And I'd love to start by just asking you about this newly discovered asteroid. The name of this asteroid is 2023DW. Based on your experience and expertise, how much of a danger does this pose to planet Earth? No, this object is not particularly concerning.

It was discovered on February 26 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in particular at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies. We keep track of those. And whenever there is a new discovery, we map the trajectory for the next 100 years and check whether there is even a remote possibility for an impact. In most cases, we find that the impact is not possible. We can rule that out very quickly. In this case, we cannot do that yet. We need more data to get to that point.

But we have a small, very small, 0.2% impact probability for 2046. I always like to put things in another way. There is a 99.8% probability that the object is not going to reach the Earth. Well, that's great to hear. But any time an asteroid is at least on some target, with some potential of hitting Earth, it makes Earthlings take note.

This asteroid is about 50 meters across, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Why was it only discovered in February? Because I know this is a concern that NASA has about asteroids being perhaps detected later than they would like. Yeah, so this object is only 50 meters. It means that it really needs to come close enough to Earth for us to pick it up. And we had to wait until last February to have the first good chance of discovering it. But NASA is really tasked with discovering more than 90% of the objects, 140 meters or greater, because those are the ones that could cause significant damage. This one is fairly small, and it's a side benefit of our search for asteroids.

And the fact that we could discover an object this small with a small impact probability in 2046, it's more than 20 years of lead time. That's a pretty good sign of what NASA can do in discovering objects. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I understand. I just want to reiterate, very, very, very slim chance that this does hit Earth. But let's just say by some chance it did, what kind of damage would an asteroid of this size do, 50 meters across? Well, I think a good analog is the Tunguska impactor that happened in 1908. That was an impact over Russia.

And that flattened trees over 2,000 square kilometers. So that's the kind of analog. But again, as you said, the probability is really small. As soon as we get new data, we're going to be able to refine the orbital calculations and update the hazard assessment. And chances are we're going to be able to rule out these possibilities. Davi, really quick, one more question for you. NASA's big spacecraft, the Dart spacecraft, that hit that asteroid and successfully hit it off course, off its orbit earlier, or I guess in November of last year, the first planetary defense test mission, could that type of technology be used to push an asteroid like this? Absolutely.

That's the very reason why we flew that mission. We wanted to see and prove that we had the capability of moving an asteroid off course in case we needed to do that. And that mission was a spectacular success. It was such a beautiful bullseye. One of my favorite space stories of the year. Davideh, for Nokia, I hope I did not butcher your name too much. Thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise and talking asteroids with me.

Thank you for having me.

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