"City-killer" asteroid has slim chance of striking moon, experts say
An asteroid that experts feared could hit Earth is no longer on track for the planet – but it still has a slim chance of striking the moon, new research says.
The 2024 YR4 asteroid is nearly the size of a football field. It was detected in December 2024, and NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies predicted then it had a 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2032. Just a few weeks later, that chance was revised by NASA and dropped to just 0.28%.
More observation and analysis conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope in late March confirmed the asteroid has a near-zero chance of striking Earth.
The asteroid, however, still has a chance of directly colliding with the moon, according to astronomer Andrew Rivkin, science and technology publication New Scientist reported this week. Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was the co-author of a report analyzing the telescope's observations, which found there is a 2% chance the asteroid could strike the moon in 2032.
That's a small increase from the 1.7% chance predicted by NASA in February.
The asteroid will be studied by the Webb telescope again in May 2025 before it disappears into the outer solar system for the next several years. The James Webb Space Telescope is a powerful observatory that studies the universe. It can study faint objects and its data is used by multiple international space agencies.
Asteroid impacts have been shaping the moon's surface for billions of years, according to NASA. They have also caused craters on Earth. Asteroids made more contact with both the moon and Earth billions of years ago, according to the American Museum of Natural History, but those incidents have lessened over the millennia, leading to "the relatively peaceful present."
It's not clear what would happen if an asteroid of this size were to strike the moon. CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood previously said that if the asteroid hit Earth, it could have "truly catastrophic" but localized effects.
"It wouldn't be something like the rock that killed the dinosaurs," Harwood said. "It wouldn't affect the global climate, but it would certainly be a disaster of every proportion. So we're all hoping that doesn't happen."
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