Valentines Day 2046 is looking bleak with an asteroid set to come dangerously close to crashing into Earth.
Scientists have announced they are keeping an eye on a newly-discovered space rock that may smash into our planet – and have pinpointed 14 February as the likely closest approach.
‘We’ve been tracking a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046,’ said Nasa this week.
‘Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future,’
Orbit analysts are set to continue monitoring asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in.
The space agency say the asteroid has an average diameter of 49 metres and is currently 0.12 astronomical unit (au) – or 17 billion km- from Earth.
One au (astronomical unit) is approximately the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
However, if the asteroid does hit it would not likely cause a global catastrophe.
In 1908, a similarly-sized asteroid of about 50-60 metres exploded over a sparsely populated Eastern Siberian forest.
It caused a 12-megaton explosion that flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 sq km.
Eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event.
On a larger scale, the asteroid thought to have wiped out dinosaurs was believed to have been between 10 and 15 kilometres wide.
The impact site, known as the Chicxulub crater, is centred on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Even if the asteroid was a definite threat, Nasa has the technology to take care of it.
In September 2022, Nasa successfully pulled off the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully crashing a spacecraft into a small asteroid as part of a planetary protection test mission.
While the asteroid – named Dimorphos – posed no threat to Earth, the aim of the mission was to demonstrate that dangerous incoming rocks can be deflected by deliberately smashing into them.
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