Giant asteroid might hit it off with Earth on Valentine's Day 23 years later

A giant asteroid could be ruining Valentine's Day plans more than two decades from now, according to the European Space Agency. 2023 DW, an asteroid the size of an Olympic swimming pool, has a tiny chance of ramming into Earth on Valentine's Day 23 years later, The New York Post reported.

The agency, which has the asteroid placed on top of its "Risk List", believes that 2023 DW has one in 625 chance of hitting our home planet in 2046. What makes the 50-meter diameter rock a threat is that it has a greater than zero probability of striking our home planet.

2023 DW is the only asteroid marked on the Risk List which has obtained a score of one on the Torino scale, a method that is used to categorise how much risk a space object poses to the Earth. Other asteroids on the list have been rated zero. Level 1 denotes that the chances of the object colliding with the Earth are “extremely unlikely with no cause for public attention or public concern,” as per the Center for Near Earth Object Studies.

NASA keeps a close watch on the asteroid 

“New telescopic observations very likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0,” the scale states. The asteroid is on the radar of NASA, which said that it has been monitoring 2023 DW and it has “a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046”. “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,” NASA Asteroid Watch said in a tweet.

The agency has said that its orbit analysts will continue to track the movement of the asteroid. But even if the threat heightens, earth-inhabitants can rest assured that NASA has enough technology to save the planet, just like it did last year. In 2022, NASA successfully carried out the DART mission of changing the orbit of a tiny asteroid and subsequently redirecting its trajectory.