Oh Yes, let's trust NASA (not)

NASA = NotASpaceAgency or NowASelloutAgency

This is not to down the good men and women scientists who work there.

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William Hunter – Daily Mail Feb 18,2025

The ‘city-destroying’ asteroid hurtling toward Earth is being carefully watched by hundreds of the world’s most powerful telescopes.

Now, NASA has quietly increased the chances that this deadly space rock will smash into the planet in 2032.

The space agency predicts that the asteroid 2024 YR4 has a one-in-38, or 2.6 per cent, chance of hitting.

When it was discovered in December last year, NASA estimated that the chances of 2024 YR4 hitting us were one in a thousand.

Currently, the odds of 2024 YR4 hitting Earth on December 12, 2032, are double what they were at the end of January less than three weeks ago.

With an estimated diameter of 54 metres (177ft), or a little taller than Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, that collision has the potential to cause enormous amounts of damage.

The asteroid was discovered on December 27 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Chile.

On January 27, 2024 YR4 truly set alarm bells ringing when it became the only large asteroid with an impact probability greater than one per cent.

This prompted NASA to award the asteroid a score of three on the Torino Scale, a standard measure for the danger of NEOs.

This rating is extremely rare since it can only be given to an object over 20 metres (65ft) in diameter with an impact probability greater than one per cent.

Were the asteroid to hit Earth, NASA estimates that the explosion would be equivalent to eight megatons of TNT.

That is more than 500 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

The resulting blast would be similar to that caused by the Tunguska Asteroid, which flattened 830 square miles (2,150 square km) of Siberian forest in 1908 – an area more than double the size of New York.

Based on current estimates of the asteroid’s orbit, astronomers have calculated a ‘risk corridor’ of locations that could be hit if it were to collide with Earth.

This path stretches from northern South America, across sub-Saharan and North Africa, and into South Asia.

Worryingly, the risk corridor passes over eight of the world’s most populated cities, including Bogota in Colombia, Lagos in Nigeria, as well as Mumbai and Chennai in India.

Those cities alone have a combined population of over 110 million people, who could be in serious danger from an asteroid impact.

In the history of astronomy, only one other asteroid has ever been given a Torino Scale rating of three or higher – that being the 185-metre (600ft) 99942 Apophis.

Apophis, nicknamed the ‘God of Chaos’ asteroid, was briefly escalated to a four on the Torino Scale in late 2004 before rapidly dropping back towards zero.

Astronomers around the world are currently holding out hope that 2024 YR4 will soon follow a similar pattern.

Most NEOs have a higher impact probability right after they are detected with the risk dropping off as scientists gather more data about their orbits.

At first, as lots of new data comes in, the probability tends to sharply increase creating the impression of a rapidly growing risk.

However, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) currently predict that this should be followed by a drop in probability once the astronomers can be more certain about the asteroid’s orbital path.

NASA spokesperson Molly Wasser wrote in a blog post: ‘As more observations of the asteroid’s orbit are obtained, its impact probability will become better known.

In 2022, NASA’s DART mission showed that it was possible to significantly alter the trajectory of a large asteroid with a satellite collision.

However, with only eight years until the asteroid arrives, some scientists have cast doubt on the plan to deflect the killer asteroid.

In a post on X, Dr Robin George Andrews, a volcanologist and author based in London, points out that we ‘have less than eight years to potentially deal with it’.

‘You need 10 years or more to build, plan and execute an asteroid deflection mission,’ he said.