An asteroid could hit Earth in 2032, NASA says. Here's what to know about the potential "city killer."
An asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has roughly a 3% chance of hitting Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes.
CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood said if it landed in a populated area, it would "be truly catastrophic," but the effects would be localized.
"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."
Scientists aren't panicking yet, but they are watching closely.
"At this point, it's 'Let's pay a lot of attention, let's get as many assets as we can observing it,'" Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, told the AFP news agency.
What we know about 2024 YR4 and its chances of hitting Earth
Dubbed 2024 YR4, the asteroid was first spotted on December 27, 2024, by the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate it is between 130 and 300 feet wide.
"An asteroid this size impacts Earth on average every few thousand years and could cause severe damage to a local region," the European Space Agency said in a statement.
By New Year's Eve, it had landed on the desk of Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at U.S. space agency NASA, as an object of concern.
"You get observations, they drop off again. This one looked like it had the potential to stick around," she told AFP.
The risk assessment kept climbing, and on January 29, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global planetary defense collaboration, issued a memo.
According to the latest calculations from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a 3.1% chance the asteroid will strike Earth on December 22, 2032.
The asteroid 2024 YR4 is now rated at Level 3 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, which is "a close encounter" that warrants attention from astronomers and the public.
If it does hit, possible impact sites include over the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia, the IAWN memo states.
2024 YR4 follows a highly elliptical, four-year orbit, swinging through the inner planets before shooting past Mars and out toward Jupiter.
For now, it's zooming away from Earth, and its next close pass will not come until 2028. Scientists will be able to get another look at the asteroid then, Harwood said, and determine its orbit and trajectory.
Betts said, "The odds are very good that not only will this not hit Earth, but at some point in the next months to few years, that probability will go to zero."
A similar scenario unfolded in 2004 with Apophis, an asteroid initially projected to have a 2.7 percent chance of striking Earth in 2029. Further observations ruled out an impact.
"City killer" category
The most infamous asteroid impact occurred 66 million years ago, when a six-mile-wide space rock triggered a global winter, wiping out the dinosaurs and 75 percent of all species.
By contrast, 2024 YR4 falls into the "city killer" category.
"If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the environs," said Betts.
The best modern comparison is the 1908 Tunguska Event, when an asteroid or comet fragment measuring 30-50 meters exploded over Siberia, flattening 80 million trees across 770 square miles.
Like that impactor, 2024 YR4 would be expected to blow up in the sky, rather than leaving a crater on the ground.
"We can calculate the energy... using the mass and the speed," said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
For 2024 YR4, the explosion from an airburst would equal around eight megatons of TNT — more than 500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
If it explodes over the ocean, the impact would be less concerning, unless it happens near a coastline triggering a tsunami.
Time to prepare
The good news, experts stress, is that we have plenty of time to prepare.
Rivkin led the investigation for NASA's 2022 DART mission, which successfully nudged an asteroid off its course using a spacecraft — a strategy known as a "kinetic impactor."
The target asteroid posed no threat to Earth, making it an ideal test subject.
"I don't see why it wouldn't work" again, he said. The bigger question is whether major nations would fund such a mission if their own territory was not under threat.
Other, more experimental ideas exist.
Lasers could vaporize part of the asteroid to create a thrust effect, pushing it off course. A "gravity tractor," a large spacecraft that slowly tugs the asteroid away using its own gravitational pull, has also been theorized.
If all else fails, the long warning time means authorities could evacuate the impact zone.
"Nobody should be scared about this," said Fast. "We can find these things, make these predictions and have the ability to plan."
Still, NASA tracks close approaches and calculates the odds of those space rocks — including asteroids, meteors and meteorites — impacting Earth.
"The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don't bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact, but a small fraction of them – called potentially hazardous asteroids – require more attention," according to the website of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the center dedicated to studying near-Earth objects for NASA.
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