Updated Calculations Refine the Impact Probability for (29075) 1950 DA

(29075) 1950 DA is a kilometer-sized asteroid that will make a close approach to Earth in 2880 and,
because of the corresponding impact probability and size,
has ranked at the top of the Sentry risk list since 2014.
The Yarkovsky effect plays an important role in assessing the impact risk and in the past has
called for significant manual intervention to compute the impact probability.
The recently released
Sentry-II system
enables the automatic processing of cases where the Yarkovsky effect is significant,
including 1950 DA.
We therefore updated the 1950 DA hazard assessment using the new system.
Compared to the previous assessment, the new results are based on an observation arc extended
by six years, more recent
debiasing and
weighting
schemes for astrometric data, and JPL’s
DE441 planetary ephemeris.
The impact probability for this new analysis decreases from 1.2e-4 (one in 8,000)
to 2.9e-05 (one in 30,000) and the Palermo scale decreases from -1.4 to -2.0.