The asteroid would potentially hit Earth on Valentine's Day in 2046.
The impact occurred at 7:15 p.m. ET greeted by cheers from the mission team in Laurel, Maryland. The DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, launched 10 months ago.A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
"This object is not particularly concerning," said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Because orbits stemming from very limited observation sets are more uncertain it is more likely that such orbits will 'permit' future impacts," the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, notes on its website.
"But then the object will remain observable for weeks so we can get plenty of observations as needed," he added.
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