NASA tracking asteroid that has potential to hit Earth in 2046

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day every year? Well, you might want to circle that day in

2046

, because the planetary defense office is

tracking

a new

asteroid

that has a very low chance of hitting Earth in 23 years. Now I'm joined by David Farr, no, he is a navigation engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laborat, Davida, thank you very much for jo. And I would love to start by talking about this newly discovered

asteroid

20, the name of this asteroid is 23. D.W. In his experience and exp, what danger does this pose to planet Earth? No, this object is not particularly worrying.

It was discovered on February 26 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, in particular at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. We track them, and every time a new record appears, we measure the trajectory of the next hundred years and check if there is even a remote window for an impact. In most cases, we find that the impact is not e.g. We can rule it out very quickly. In this case, we can't do that. We need more data to get to that. But we have a small, very small probability of impact for 20, 46. I always like to put things another way.

There is a 99.8% chance that the object will reach Earth. Well, that's great to hear. But, you know, every time an asteroid has at least some

potential

to hit Earth, it makes Earthlings go crazy. This asteroid is about 50 meters wide, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Why was it only discovered in Fe? Because I know this is a concern that NASA has about asteroids maybe being detected later than they would like. Yes. So this object is only 50 meters away. This means it really needs to get 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's real task is to discover more than 90% of the objects. 140 meters or more, because those are the ones that could cause a major dam. This one is quite small, and is a secondary benefit of our astero search. And the fact that we can discover an object is small with a small probability of impact. It's like 20 More than 20 years of leadership. That's a very good sign that he's pretty good at object discovery. Yes absolutely. Then I understood it. I just want to reiterate that there is very, very little chance of this reaching Earth.

But let's say by chance, what kind of damage would an asteroid of this size of 50 meters in diameter cause? Well, I think a good analogue is the Tunguska impactor that occurred in 19 08. That was an impact on Rus and it crushed trees over 2000 square kilometers. So that's the kind of analogue. But again, as you said, the probability is really small. As soon as we get new data, we will be able to refine the orbital calculation and update the hazard assessment. And we can probably rule out this possibility very quickly. One more question for you. The big NASA spacecraft, the DART spacecraft that hit that asteroid and successfully deflected it from its orbit before or I guess in November of last year.

The first test of planetary defense Could that type of technology be to push an asteroid like this approximately? That's the reason we flew that mission. We wanted to see and demonstrate that we had the ability to deflect an asteroid off course if we needed to do so. And that mission was a spectacular success. It was such a beautiful target. One of my favorite space stories of the year, Derby Day for Nokia. I hope I haven't ruined your name too much. Thank you very much for sharing with me all your experience in talking with asteroids. Thanks for having me.