‘City-killer’ asteroid prompts NASA’s planetary defense office
An asteroid with the power to unleash an explosion one hundred times greater than an atomic bomb has triggered global space agency alarms.
The odds that the space rock dubbed Y4, which is nearly the size of a football field at between 130 and 300 feet wide, could hit Earth is now too close to ignore, they warn.
“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 Agence France-Presse last week.
The 2024 YR4 asteroid observed by NASA using the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope at the New Mexico Institute of Technology on January 27, 2025. NASA/Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope/New Mexico Institute of Technology/Ryan/AFP via Getty Images
The asteroid was first observed on December 27, 2024, from the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.
The assessment or risk continued to escalate through January 29 — that’s when the International Asteroid Warning Network released a memo on Y4’s threat.
Its sighting prompted a response from the US defenses at NASA. “You get observations, they drop off again. This one looked like it had the potential to stick around,” Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at NASA told AFP.
The likelihood of impact now stands at 1.6%, moving at a speed that would meet Earth by December 22, 2032.
Potential crash sites include the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia, per the IAWN memo.
Map highlighting the “risk corridor” for the 2032 YR4 impact. Credit: Daniel Bamberger (Renerpho) Wikimedia Commons
NASA is hopeful that its 2022 DART mission proves that a 2028 hit could be avoided.
“Nobody should be scared about this,” said Fast. “We can find these things, make these predictions and have the ability to plan.”
Y4 is currently zooming away from Earth and won’t come back around until 2028.
Analysis of 2024 YR4’s orbit indicates that the asteroid will come within 66,000 miles of Earth on December 22, 2032. Credit Nasa/JPL/Wikimedia Commons
“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,” said Betts.
“At this point, it’s ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s get as many assets as we can observing it.”
