NASA Continues To Raise the Odds That an Asteroid Dubbed ‘the City Destroyer’ Will Collide With Earth
The YR4 spans 100 meters and its impact would be comparable to eight million tons of dynamite.
The chances of “Asteroid 2024 YR4” impacting our planet’s surface in 2032 are now at a 1-in-32 or 3.1 percent, according to a report from the space agency’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The chance for collision has edged upward since last week when it was reported that NASA raised the probability of the asteroid impacting Earth’s surface to 2.6 percent.
The odds from the European Space Agency are slightly lower at 2.41 percent.
The latest percentage probability significantly rose from projections announced earlier on Tuesday at 2.3 percent.
The YR4 spans 100 meters and has also been nicknamed “the city killer” because its impact is comparable to eight million tons of dynamite. The resulting explosion, if it careened into the Earth, would be 500 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. It would have a 31-mile blast radius around the point of impact, according to Wired.
The YR4 was first discovered on December 27, 2024, and is listed as the most dangerous space object near Earth. It was recently placed on NASA’s risk list of near-Earth objects.
Astronomists say the chance of a catastrophic incident is slim.
“Just because it’s gone up in the last week doesn’t mean that it’s going to continue to do that,” a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, Hugh Lewis, said to New Scientist. “Any observations we can make between now and when it’s out of view will obviously help us to refine the orbit and to make better predictions.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will go down before April. It could continue to go up but still ultimately miss us.”
In a recent post on the social media site Bluesky, an operations engineer with the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, David Rankin, said that YR4 also has a scant possibility to hit Earth’s moon, but at 0.3 percent, it would not be much of a concern either.
“There is the possibility this would eject some material back out that could hit the Earth,” Mr. Rankin said to New Scientist in a separate report, “but I highly doubt it would cause any major threat.”
