An asteroid has a 2% chance of hitting Earth in 2032. Here's how astronomers are tracking it
A recently discovered asteroid, named 2024 YR4, has on average a 2% chance of hitting Earth in 2032. While those odds of an impact are slim, astronomers are closely tracking the space rock to uncover more details — a process that could soon involve the most powerful observatory ever launched into space.
Not much is known about 2024 YR4, but the asteroid is estimated to be 131 to 295 feet (40 to 90 meters) wide, a 'size range comparable to that of a large building,' said Dr. Paul Chodas, manager for the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, or CNEOS, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
That's not even close to the size of the 'planet-killer' asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of dinosaurs. That one was estimated to be about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter and marked the last known large asteroid to hit our world. Planet killer asteroids are space rocks that are 1 kilometer across or larger and could have a devastating effect on life.
But smaller asteroids can cause regional devastation if they are determined to be on a collision course with Earth, which is why astronomers need to find out as much as possible — as soon as possible — about 2024 YR4.
Acquiring more data, like refining the space rock's trajectory, may reduce the odds of a direct hit to zero. But astronomers only have a certain amount of time to observe the asteroid before it fades from view in April. Now, they're planning to turn the powerful eye of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2024 YR4's direction with the hopes of pinning down the space rock's size and orbit.
Tracking a potentially hazardous space rock
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, first discovered 2024 YR4 on December 27. The telescope is one of the asteroid discovery programs funded by NASA to scan the sky in search of near-Earth asteroids, said Davide Farnocchia, navigation engineer at JPL and CNEOS, via email.
The size estimate of the asteroid has changed very little since then, despite multiple observations using an array of telescopes, because the space rock can only be studied using the amount of sunlight it reflects. The amount of light reflected by the asteroid's surface is used to estimate how big it is.
However, the Webb telescope, slated to begin observations of 2024 YR4 in early March, sees the universe in infrared light. Webb will be able to measure the heat reflected by the asteroid and provide a much more accurate size estimate, according to a Nature study published in December.
Since early January, astronomers have used the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico, the Danish Telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to track the asteroid, which is currently more than 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) from Earth and moving farther away over time, Farnocchia said. The celestial object should be visible through early April and disappear as it continues its orbit around the sun.
Observatories in Hawaii are also actively tracking the asteroid. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, located on the Haleakalā volcano in Maui, is the world's leading near-Earth object discovery telescope. Capable of spotting asteroids when they're distant from Earth, Pan-STARRS is currently part of the effort to follow 2024 YR4's movements.
'Hawaiʻi's telescopes are some of the most important tools for planetary defense,' said Doug Simons, director at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, in a statement. 'Thanks to our prime location and advanced technology, we can spot, track, and study asteroids with incredible accuracy. That gives scientists the time they need to evaluate potential threats and figure out the best ways to respond.'
Webb will still be able to observe 2024 YR4 once the asteroid is beyond the viewing capabilities of Earth-based telescopes, providing measurements of the asteroid's position, according to the European Space Agency. After the initial observations in March, a second observation campaign has been planned for May. Scientists will use that data to provide the final measurements of the asteroid's orbit, as well as how its temperature has changed as it moves farther from the sun.
If 2024 YR4 disappears from view before space agencies can rule out any chance of impact, the space rock will remain on the risk list until it is back in view in June 2028. Current estimates of the asteroid's orbit suggest it returns to Earth's vicinity every four years, but it won't pose a threat in 2028, according to the University of Hawaii.
Estimating the risks
Understanding the exact size of the asteroid can help astronomers to estimate the risks if 2024 YR4 is determined to be on a future collision course with Earth.
'If the asteroid turns out to be on the large end of its estimated size range, the impact could produce blast damage as far as 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the impact site,' Chodas said. 'But that's in the unlikely event that it might impact at all. The potential for damage arises because of the incredibly high speed (about 17 kilometers per second, or 38,028 miles per hour) at which the asteroid would enter the atmosphere.'
Asteroids of this size impact Earth every few thousand years, and they can cause severe damage to local regions, according to the ESA.
In 1908, a 30-meter-wide (98-foot-wide) asteroid struck the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in a remote Siberian forest of Russia, according to the Planetary Society. The event leveled trees and destroyed forests across 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers).
And in 2013, a 20-meter-wide (66-foot-wide) asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded in the air, releasing 20 to 30 times more energy than that of the first atomic bomb, generating brightness greater than the sun, exuding heat, damaging more than 7,000 buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people.
But if 2024 YR4 is on the larger end, the effects could be significantly worse, according to the ESA.
'If the asteroid is found to have a diameter in the (50 meter) range, and if it can be confirmed that it is a rocky asteroid, the effects would be similar to those of the Tunguska impact in 1908, where a surface area of (2,000 square kilometers) was devastated and 20 million trees were affected,' according to a document shared by the agency. 'This is equivalent to the area of a circle (25 kilometers) in diameter. If larger, the effects would extend to several tens of (kilometers).'
About 3,000 new near-Earth objects are found each year, but it's been more difficult to find asteroids within the size range of 2024 YR4 because they're dark, smaller and harder to spot with telescopes. Scientists estimate that there are about 600,000 rocky objects similar in size to the asteroid, but only about 2%, or 12,000, have been found, according to the ESA.
'Tiny asteroids do hit the Earth all the time, disintegrating in the atmosphere as fireballs; fortunately small ones cause little damage on the ground,' said Larry Denneau, an astronomer at University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy and coprincipal investigator at the ATLAS telescope, in a statement. 'Larger asteroids can cause much more damage, but they impact the Earth much less frequently. There are still many large ones out there that we haven't found yet, which is why we are continuously monitoring the whole sky to ensure that we stay ahead of potential threats.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
This stratospheric airship is 65,000 miles above Earth investigating which gas companies are leaking methane
Inside an airplane hangar in Roswell, New Mexico, a massive blimp-like airship—214 feet long—is getting ready to float into the stratosphere. Built by a startup called Sceye (pronounced 'sky'), the helium-filled aircraft is designed to gather information that satellites miss. In its next flight, in July, it will hover over New Mexico sending back real-time data about pollution from the state's hundreds of oil and gas producers. It can report not only that there's a plume of methane pollution in the air, but that a particular gas tank from a particular company is leaking a specific amount of the potent greenhouse gas each hour. 'We can see the specific emitter and the rate of emissions in real time,' says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye's CEO. 'And that's entirely new.' How a social entrepreneur started working with NASA tech Frandsen, a Danish social entrepreneur, is known for transforming Vestergaard, his family's textile business, into a company focused on humanitarian innovation. (The company makes mosquito nets to help fight malaria, for example, and a spinoff called LifeStraw makes water purification tech.) Because of his work, Frandsen was invited to be part of an effort to discover how tech from NASA could be used to help improve life on Earth. That's how he learned about HAPS, or 'high-altitude platform systems,' the technology that now underlies Sceye's work. HAPS are designed to go to the edge of space, around 65,000 feet above the surface of the Earth. 'You're twice as high as air traffic, you're above the jet stream, you're 95-97% through the atmosphere,' Frandsen says. 'So you can look up with great accuracy at stars, study black holes, look at asteroids. They were promoting this as a platform for science. I was reading this and thinking, sure, but you can also look down. You can have an entirely new way of addressing ocean conservation, or human trafficking, or last-mile connectivity, or methane monitoring, or early wildfire detection.' The concept for a HAPS airship wasn't new. 'It turned out the U.S. government had already spent billions trying to build this 'stratospheric airship' because staying below orbital altitude was considered sort of the holy grail of aviation,' he says. He started looking into why past efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s hadn't worked, and realized that some factors had changed. New materials like graphene, for example, could help significantly reduce the weight of the airship and the batteries onboard. A decade of R&D Sceye, which was founded in 2014 and is based in New Mexico, took an iterative approach to its R&D. 'I learned from studying those previous attempts that government funding often incentives you to go straight to prototype build,' he says. 'You don't have that iterative learning that tells you if you fail, why did you fail? Or if you succeed, why did you succeed? In every case, it didn't succeed, and they didn't really get their arms around the 'why.' So it all stranded there.' In 2026, the startup tested a nine-foot version of the device. A year later, that scaled up to 70 feet. The prototypes kept growing and flying higher. By 2021, the team succeeded in reaching the stratosphere. In 2022, they started doing demonstration flights. A year ago, the company successfully showed that the airship could operate through day and night. In the day, it runs on solar power; at night, it's powered by batteries. The company also raised a Series C round of funding in 2024, which Pitchbook estimates totalling $130 million. (Sceye declined to confirm fundraising numbers, but said that it was valued at $525 million before the Series C round.) This year, the company plans to use its flights to demonstrate that the tech can hover in place for extended periods of time. Eventually, the team aims to be able to keep the HAPS in position for as long as 365 days. The 2025 flights will also demonstrate some of the uses of the tech. The company plans to deploy its platform in several ways; the next flight will also test the ability to track wildfires, for example. But it's particularly well suited for tracking methane emissions. A powerful tool for tracking methane Methane is potent greenhouse gas. Over the short term, it's more than 80 times more powerful than CO2 at heating up the planet. Methane emissions are also surging; leaks from fossil fuel production are a major source of the pollution. New Mexico, which is part of the Permian Basin boom in oil and gas, adopted a methane waste rule in 2021 to try to tackle the problem. By the end of next year, producers will have to achieve a 98% capture rate for methane. 'We are looking at how we can make sure that gas is kept in the pipe and goes to its intended market instead of being released into the atmosphere,' says Michelle Miano, environmental protection division director at the New Mexico Environment Department. The state started working with Sceye in 2021, in a partnership with the EPA. Right now, much of the data about emissions comes directly from companies themselves; that obviously makes it difficult for the state to confirm accuracy. Satellite data can also help track methane emissions, but not in the same granular detail. 'From space, it takes a lot of time in order to crunch that data and trace it back and figure out who exactly is the emitter in a certain region,' says Miano. 'With technology that's closer to the ground, there is the ability to get closer to some of the facilities to understand more specifically where they might be coming from.' Because the Sceye airship is designed to stay in one position, it can continuously monitor emissions over hundreds of square miles in a region. Infrared sensors monitor methane emissions, while cameras take detailed photographs that can be overlaid with that data. The system means that it's possible to spot leaks that a satellite can miss because it only passes over an area temporarily. Satellites also don't have the same resolution. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-5, for example, sees methane in pixels that each represent seven square kilometers; the HAPS can get as close as one meter. (Sceye says that its approach is also more cost-effective than some other methods, including sensors on the ground that are slow to install, and planes or drones that have high hourly rates and can only take snapshots.) 'If we work with an oil company, we can say, 'Hey, well number 62 has been leaking 68 kilos of methane per hour for the last 12 minutes,' Frandsen says. The company is now negotiating contracts with some fossil fuel companies, and planning to begin demonstration flights for them this year and commercial contracts next year. In a test flight over New Mexico last year, the team identified a 'super emitter' in Texas that was pumping an estimated 1,000 kilograms of methane an hour into the air—the equivalent of the hourly emissions from 210,000 cars. When Sceye shared that data with the EPA last year, it's not clear if the agency sent a warning letter to the polluter. Now, the Trump-era EPA is pulling back on enforcement. Congress also voted to stop the EPA from implementing a tax on excess methane emissions. But the New Mexico state government plans to continue doing as much as it can to fight pollution. Sceye's data could help it work more efficiently. 'We are looking at how to increase funding for our agencies so that we are able to utilize technologies technologies that are coming online up and beyond standard reporting and standard on-the-ground inspections,' Miano says. 'Because we have a limited staff, there are new ways that we need to continue looking at facilities with compliance issues to make sure that we can address as much as possible.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Hiltzik: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes. Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on proposed NASA budget cuts The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, "NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration," says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on "practical, quantitative," even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. Read more: Hiltzik: Trump's assault on science will make Americans dumber and sicker The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: "America will always be the first in space," he said during his first term. "We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led." Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that "the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that." Among the "foreign class of servants," whom Vance acknowledged included "some German and Jewish scientists" who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. Read more: Hiltzik: Elon Musk's dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. "Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles," Dreier observes. In this White House, however, "there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency." A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a "hoax." He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Read more: How the U.S. gave up on Nobel Prize research Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. Read more: Hiltzik: The Pentagon's former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its "misguided ... Global Climate Change programs," and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is "very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do" in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. "Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money," Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but "I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates," Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. "You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space," he told me. "It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes." Get the latest from Michael HiltzikCommentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Mars Orbiter Captures Rare View of Ancient Volcano Poking Above the Clouds
Floating in orbit above Mars, NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured a panorama of the Red Planet's biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, peeking over a sea of clouds. The picturesque moment offers an exceptionally rare view of a Martian volcano, showing the landform at an angle in space that captures the planet's horizon. 'We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it didn't disappoint,' Jonathon Hill, the operations lead for Odyssey's camera and a mission planner at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, said in a statement. THEMIS can view Mars in both visible and infrared light. Launched in 2001, Odyssey has been circling around Mars for over two decades, studying the Martian surface. But in 2023, the orbiter began taking breathtaking panoramic views of the Martian horizon. Because THEMIS can't pivot to get these stunning views, the orbiter flips on its side, rotating a full 90 degrees. That way, it captured Mars' 'limb,' the edge of the planet's horizon. This is THEMIS' fourth limb observation since 2023. Odyssey captured the image on May 2, just before dawn. In it, Arsia Mons stands 12 miles (20 kilometers) high and measures 70 miles (450 km) in diameter. For comparison, Earth's tallest volcano, Mauna Loa, stands 6 miles (9 km) above the seafloor and measures 75 miles (121 km) in diameter. Arsia Mons is also one of Mars' cloudiest volcanoes and the southernmost of the three Tharsis volcanoes that form Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains. These mountains are often surrounded by water ice clouds, particularly early in the morning. The clouds form when air expands as it blows up the sides of the mountain and then rapidly cools. This view also allows scientists to study Martian weather and phenomena like dust clouds and how they change over the course of the seasons. Odyssey might be able to capture a few more of these panoramas before its eventual retirement, likely at the end of this year.
