A newly detected asteroid, nearly the size of a football field, has a greater than one percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years, sparking concerns over city-level devastation.
The asteroid, named 2024 YR4, was first spotted on December 27, 2024, and is estimated to be between 130 and 300 feet wide. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a 1.6% chance the asteroid will strike Earth on December 22, 2032.
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 destructive potential of an impact would be significant, with an explosion equal to around eight megatons of TNT, more than 500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
However, experts stress that we have plenty of time to prepare and that there are ways to prevent or mitigate the impact. NASA’s DART mission successfully nudged an asteroid off its course using a spacecraft, and other experimental ideas, such as laser vaporization and gravity tractors, are being explored.
“We can find these things, make these predictions, and have the ability to plan,” said Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at NASA. “Nobody should be scared about this.”
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-02-city-killer-asteroid-earth.html