For the tl;dr crowd, let's get this out of the way right away: asteroid 2012 DA14 is almost certainly not going to hit the Earth next February. And by "almost certainly", I mean it: the odds of an impact are so low they are essentially zero. This does not rule out an impact at some future date, but for now we're safe.
So what's the story? A small near-Earth asteroid was discovered in late February by astronomers at the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra
