Asteroid 2024 YR4 is certainly keeping NASA on its toes, as the threat of its potential to collide with Earth in 2032 continues to yo-yo.
Just three days ago, the space agency announced that the now-notorious piece of space rock had a roughly 3 per cent chance of colliding with our planet — but by Thursday that probability has dropped.
According to NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the risk of the massive space rock, dubbed a “city killer,” has now fallen to about 1.5 per cent.
The near-Earth asteroid first made headlines last month, when NASA and the European Space Agency announced its existence and said it carried a 1 per cent chance of coming into contact with our planet. The highest estimate, by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, suggested a 3.1 per cent chance the asteroid will hit Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.
That increase briefly saw 2024 YR4 become the most risky asteroid in the history of CNEOS’s Sentry Risk Table.
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“An asteroid this size impacts Earth on average every few thousand years and could cause severe damage to a local region,” the ESA said in a space safety briefing. “As a result, the object rose to the top of ESA’s asteroid risk list.”
Regarding the most recent drop in impact risk, NASA wrote: “New observations of asteroid 2024 YR4 helped us update its chance of impact in 2032. The current probability is 1.5%.”
“Our understanding of the asteroid’s path improves with every observation. We’ll keep you posted,” the agency said, indicating that more updates are sure to come.
The asteroid measures between 40 and 90 metres wide, based on estimates from its reflected light.
Scientists have previously said it’s not keeping them up at night and no one should panic, despite not being able to rule out the possibility of an impact.
While experts are unsure where the collision would happen, a warning published in late January by the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) said the impact risk corridor extends “across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.”
If it did strike Earth, 2024 YR4 would cause “severe blast damage,” according to IAWN, spanning as far as 50 kilometres from the impact site.
According to the ESA, NASA and other space agencies will be using the James Webb Space Telescope to continue to get an even more accurate assessment of the asteroid’s size in order to better understand “how significant an impact could be.”
“It is very important that we improve our size estimate for 2024 YR4: the hazard represented by a 40 m asteroid is very different from that of a 90 m asteroid,” the report reads.
—With files from Global News’ Katie Scott
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