'No need to worry': Odds drop newly-found asteroid will hit Earth
The chances have plummeted that a newly-discovered asteroid with the potential to wipe out a city will hit Earth on Valentine's Day 2046, the European Space Agency said on Tuesday.
The asteroid, which is named 2023 DW and is estimated to be around the size of a 50-metre Olympic swimming pool, was first spotted by a small Chilean observatory on February 26.
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.
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.
However Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA's planetary defence office, told AFP on Tuesday that overnight the probability fell to one in 1,584.
"It will go down now with every observation until it reaches zero in a couple of days at the latest," he said.
"No one needs to be worried about this guy."
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.
"We tend to be a little more conservative, but it definitely appears to now have a downward trend in probability," NASA's planetary defence officer Lindley Johnson told AFP.
He said it was normal for the impact odds of newly discovered asteroids to briefly rise before rapidly falling.
This is because new observations shrink the "uncertainty region" where the asteroid will travel to on its closest point to Earth, he said.
While the Earth is still inside that uncertainty region, the odds temporarily increase -- until further observations exclude Earth and the probability drops down to
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