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Astronomers will have more information later this spring about the asteroid’s path and its likelihood of hitting Earth.
The odds of a recently discovered asteroid hitting the Earth in 2032 have slightly increased, but one local scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said there’s no need to worry.
The asteroid, called 2024 YR4, was first discovered in December, and scientists said then that the odds of a strike were slightly more than 1 percent. Last week, that risk increased to a 2.3 percent chance of hitting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032, according to NASA.
The space rock is estimated to be 130 to 300 feet across, but NASA said it will continue to monitor it to assess its size. It will be visible through April, after which it will become too faint until June 2028, according to the administration.
“That’s when we will probably refine its orbit even more, and also its size, and then the picture will be clear if it’s gonna hit Earth or not, and how devastating that could be,” MIT’s Artem Burdanov said.
Burdanov, a research scientist at the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, said 2024 YR4 is “the most dangerous thing we have so far” and astronomers “need to monitor it.”
“We need to observe it more, and then we can make an informed decision about that, but it’s good that we have telescopes and scientists who can do this type of work and inform the public about the threat,” Burdanov said.
According to NASA’s Sentry, a collision monitoring system, 2024 YR4 is the only known space object that registers on the Torino Scale, which is a tool for categorizing Earth impact events. 2024 YR4 is categorized as a three, which is a “close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers,” especially if the encounter is less than a decade away.
All other objects on the Sentry are categorized as zero, or no hazard.
Burdanov compared 2024 YR4 to the Tunguska event, where a similarly sized asteroid with an estimated diameter of 130 feet exploded over a remote area in Siberia in 1908. According to NASA, the Tunguska asteroid released energy equivalent to 150 kilotons of TNT.
“It’s not a dinosaur-killing asteroid, which was 10 kilometers in diameter, but it can do some serious damage,” Burdanov said about 2024 Y4R.
In the unlikely chance the asteroid is on a path to hit Earth in 2032, Burdanov said scientists will be able to predict when and where it will hit, allowing people to be evacuated or even possibly deflecting the asteroid’s orbit.
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