It might be too late to stop ‘city-killer’ asteroid headed toward Earth: scientist

What a rock-block.

An award-winning UK scientist warns that it might be too late to deflect the “city killer” asteroid that’s headed toward Earth.

Deflection efforts “might not be able to stop 2024 YR4,” cautioned Dr. Robin George Andrews, a London-based volcanologist and author, in a chilling X post blowing up online.

Discovered hurtling through our galaxy in December 2024, the building-sized space rock is reportedly at the top of NASA’s watch list when it comes to deep space dangers, boasting a 1-in-43 chance of striking Earth in 2023.

And while the odds of armageddon might seem slim, Dr. Andrews believes that we’re in big trouble if the intergalactic gravel is indeed on a collision course with our planet.

The scientist threw cold water on the defense potential of the DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft, which was successfully used to knock the 580-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos off course in 2022.

This cosmic kamikaze mission reportedly shortened its orbit by more than half-an-hour, potentially paving the way for humans to alter the trajectory of other dangerous cosmic bodies.

While Andrews acknowledged that this celestial crash test “worked wonders,” he warned that this doesn’t mean we can “deflect any asteroid whenever we want.”

“So much could go wrong if we try and hit it with something like DART,” said the researcher.

He noted that many asteroids are loose rubble piles of sand, dirt and boulders tethered tenuously together by gravity. When hit, they could fragment and potentially send this interstellar shrapnel hurtling toward Earth — a phenomenon Andrews analogized to “turning a cannonball into a shotgun spray.”

Even if the strike was successful, there might not be enough time to significantly alter the asteroid’s path, warned the scientist. He noted that YR4 is arriving in just 8 years while it takes “10 years or more to build, plan and execute an asteroid deflection mission.”

“This is because the deflection a kinetic impactor can give an Earthbound asteroid would be tiny,” he said, noting that DART only altered Dimorphos’ velocity by several millimeters. “Only over time does the shifted orbit add up enough to ensure it’ll miss Earth.”

“With only a few years down the line, we could accidentally deflect it—but not enough to make it avoid the planet,” Andrews theorized. “Then, it still hits Earth, just somewhere else that wasn’t going to be hit.”

This outcome could be catastrophic given that a strike by YR4 would allegedly cause roughly the same amount of damage as the Tunguska event, which laid waste to around 80 million trees in Siberia in 1908, according to Space.com.

Despite the potential danger, Andrews assured the public that 2024 YR4 will “probably miss Earth.”

“But if it doesn’t, we have to be wary of trying to save the world but accidentally making the problem worse,” he said. “Maybe we’ll just have to get out of the asteroid’s way this time.”

NASA recently enlisted the aid of the James Webb telescope — the planet’s most powerful — to study 2024 YR4 and gauge how much damage it would cause if it did strike the Earth.

The instrument would help astronomers glean a more accurate measurement of the rock’s size by using its infrared instruments to study the heat emitted by it.

This data will in turn be “used by ESA (the European Space Agency), NASA, and other organizations to more confidently assess the hazard and determine any necessary response,” the ESA wrote.