2024 YR4

New York Post

 

‘City-killer’ asteroid is hurtling by Earth — and scientists are warning of its potential impact

By Hannah Sparks

Published Feb. 2, 2025, 11:09 a.m. ET

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

“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.”

National Review

 

Asteroid 2024 YR4: Odds Worsen (for Now)

By Andrew Stuttaford

February 9, 2025 7:51 AM

 

The chances that Asteroid 2024 YR4, a rock between 130 and 300 feet wide, will crash into the Earth (or, probably, just explode above the planet’s surface) just before Christmas 2032 have been creeping up. When I wrote about this the other day, the odds of an ugly encounter between that rock and ours had risen from 1.6 to 1.9 percent. They have now risen to 2.3 percent. Should the asteroid hit, it would be far from an extinction-level event for humanity, but while that’s good news, an airburst would, it is thought, be equivalent to about five hundred (there are higher or lower estimates) Hiroshimas, very bad news for any city in the neighborhood.

 

As I mentioned in that earlier post, the International Asteroid Warning Network says YR4’s “impact risk” corridor is “across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.”

 

2032 is still a long way away, and the odds can move down as well as up, but the increase in the still remote chance of a hit underlines the case for starting preparations to act against YR4 the next time it returns to our neighborhood in 2028. A “deflection” mission such as that pulled off by NASA’s DART in 2022 typically takes three to five years to put together, so the case for at least beginning preparations for such an enterprise is now looking even stronger. Even if it proves unnecessary, it would be a useful training exercise, and that seems worthwhile. Sooner or later something nasty will head our way, so we had better be prepared. The DART mission cost $325 million, roughly equivalent to the cost of between 80-125 wind turbines, of, shall we say, questionable value.