Panic over: the ‘city killer’ asteroid at risk of slamming into Earth like a grenade is now overwhelmingly likely to pass on by.
The latest calculation from Nasa shows it only has a 0.0027% chance of hitting Earth, meaning the odds of this happening are 1 in 37,0000.
This is down from a peak of around 1 in 32, which triggered concerns of how to mount a planetary defence mission.
There was even talk of having to blast the space rock with a nuclear bomb in space, in a risky and untested manouevre.
The asteroid had been given the highest ever threat level, at a 3 on the Torino scale.
But after examining it more closely, Nasa concluded that we don’t need to worry (much – though you’re still a lot less likely to win the lottery).
This is what we hoped would happen, and it’s not unusual for an asteroid to initially appear more likely of a strike before the probability is refined down.
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Nasa said latest observations show ‘there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century’.
They said there is still a small chance of it hitting the Moon on December 22, 2032, however, which was estimated at 1.7% yesterday.
If you feel like you’re hearing more scary stories about asteroids lately, it’s not that more are coming our way, but that we’re getting better at noticing them.
Previously, we might only have realised we were in danger after a rock actually hit us, which definitely was not preferable.
As we get better at observing them, we will know about them much further in advance. If one does seem to be coming out way, we’ll have a better chance to knock it off course, or at the very least to get out of the way.
If 2024-YR4 had hit, the UK was still not within the predicted ‘impact risk corridor’, according to the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN).
This corridor stretches across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia, the IAWN said.
Estimated at being up to 90m across, the asteorid could have caused ‘severe blast damage’ as far as 50 km (31 miles) from the impact site.
Chris Hadfield, a retired astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station, said it could potentially strike with a force 500 times more powerful than the atomic bombs which ended World War Two.
He said: ‘It’s like a grenade. A grenade is no bigger than your fist, but it can do damage over a wide area.’
The rock was like a ‘bullet zeroing in on Earth from deep space’, travelling at around 17 kilometres per second,’ he added while speaking with LBC.
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