NASA Gives ‘All Clear’ for Asteroid That Seemed to Threaten Earth
The New York Times
The odds that the space rock, 2024 YR4, will smash into our planet in 2032 have dropped to nearly zero, leading astronomers to conclude that we are no longer in danger.
Astronomers have been carefully watching 2024 YR4, a space rock with a heightened chance of hitting Earth in 2032. But fear not: NASA announced on Monday that it posed a threat no longer — the odds that the asteroid would smash into our planet have dropped to nearly zero.
“I knew this was likely to go away as we collected more data,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “I was sleeping pretty well.”
Days after skywatchers reported their observations of 2024 YR4 on Dec. 27, 2024, scientists calculated that it had more than a 1 percent chance of striking Earth — the only large asteroid known to have an impact probability so big.
As scientists studied more data on the object, the odds of impact continued to rise through January and February, from 1.2 percent to a peak of 3.1 percent on Tuesday last week.
That may sound small, but the probability was higher than any ever recorded by NASA for an object of this size or bigger.
Somewhere between 130 and 300 feet wide, 2024 YR4 is big enough to potentially wipe out a city. Early estimates of the asteroid’s trajectory showed it could possibly slam into or explode in the air over large metropolitan areas, including Mumbai, India, and Lagos, Nigeria.
