City-killer asteroid heading towards Earth caught on film
An asteroid which has a one in 32 chance of hitting the Earth with enough force to destroy a city has been caught on camera. Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a slightly higher than 3% chance of hitting the Earth and has been placed at the top of the danger klist by NASA and the European Space Agency.
By April 2025, the object will be so far away that it will become too faint to be detected by Earth-based telescopes, meaning we won't be able to track its progress and its possibility of hitting Earth until 2028.
The latest impact probability is available on the automated Sentry page at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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If the asteroid entered the atmosphere over a populated region, an airburst of an object on the smaller side of the size range, about 130 - 200 feet (40 - 60 meters) could shatter windows or cause minor structural damage across a city. An asteroid about 300 feet (90 meters) in size, which is much less likely, could cause more severe damage, potentially collapsing residential structures across a city and shattering windows across larger regions.
If the asteroid does head for Earth and is of a size that could cause devastation, a kinetic impactor spacecraft like NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission - which collided with the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022 - is one asteroid deflection technique that could be used to address a potentially hazardous asteroid in the future.
'If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the environs,' Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, told AFP.
Scientists say the current trajectory puts the asteroid over seven potential large cities - including Mumbai.
Each asteroid is unique, and deflection would depend on the asteroid's size, physical properties, orbit, and discovery warning time. For 2024 YR4, NASA are still in the information gathering stage.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 will arrive on December 22, 2032. Some astronomers have described it as a 'city killer' and say it could detonate with hundreds of times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. It has been compared to the Tunguska strike, which flatted hundreds of square miles of trees when it an asteroid exploded in the atmosphere 100 years ago.
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