NASA’s latest calculations place the probability that the asteroid 2024 yr4 It impacts with the land by 2.3%, a figure that the European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed with its own estimate of 2.27%.
For those who have lost their account, in just one week of observations we have gone from 1 among 83 possibilities that the asteroid crossing with the planet Earth to 1 between 43.
The options are still low, but they are high enough for the offices of NASA planetary defense and that They have intensified their monitoring efforts. Even the James Webb space telescope, of 10,000 million dollars, will be monitoring the small asteroid.
2024 YR4 is not much, but with a diameter of between 40 and 90 meters, it could destroy an entire city if it survived the reentry and impact an urban area. When? On January 22, 2032. Where? At some point in the strip that extends from the East of the Pacific Ocean to northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea and the south of Asia.
It should be noted that these impact estimates are calculated taking as reference the quotient between the diameter of the earth and the width of the asteroid uncertainty zone, generated from simulations.
The problem: 2024 YR4 is moving away from Earth in an elliptical trajectory, which makes detection with conventional instruments difficult. In a few weeks it will have become so faint that even professional four -meter telescopes have trouble capturing it.
As of April, it will be necessary to resort to the Webb or the Vary Large Telescope of the Austral European Observatory to continue watching it until the object reappears In June 2028. The monitoring of the trajectory of an asteroid is a dynamic process that surely gives us a roller coaster of emotions.
As more observations from the asteroid and its trajectory have, the probability of impact could increase again and then progressively reduce until reaching zeroconfirming the main hypothesis: that the asteroid will pass by instead of colliding with the earth.
If not, the good news is that humanity has experience in asteroid diversion. In 2022, NASA’s Dart mission showed that it is possible to alter the trajectory of a spatial object through a kinetic impact. This historical achievement is the empirical test that we have the technology and knowledge necessary to at least try to protect our planet.
Meanwhile, the UN has put on alert the Space Missions Advisory Group (SMPAG), which agreed to meet again at the end of April or early May to study possible mitigation measures in case the probability of impact is maintained or increased .
Images | Daniel Bamberger
In WorldOfSoftware | The impact probability of asteroid 2024 YR4 has risen to 1.6%. The UN has already activated a special protocol
