Asteroid 2024 YR4, which is estimated to be between 130 and 300 feet wide, will be back in our neighborhood in 2028.
UFOs and even their lowly drone successors are, whether real or imagined, relatively sophisticated bits of machinery, but a colossal rock headed our way through space is a primitive, no-reasoning-with-it sort of thing, even if it has been deliberately hurled at us by Arachnids from far away.
Asteroid 2024 YR4, which is estimated to be between 130 and 300 feet wide is, however, just doing its thing, thrown by nobody, and hurtling through space away from us. But it will be back in our neighborhood in 2028. So far so uneventful. Unfortunately it will then return in 2032, and, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there was a 1.6 percent chance the asteroid will strike Earth on December 22, 2032. That number has now risen to 1.9 percent. The asteroid, CBS relates, was first spotted by an observatory in Chile in late December, and its trajectory was analyzed by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, a body which — hands off DOGE — I am glad exists (it’s only been around since 2016), and concerns that this rock might hit us began to mount.
At the end of January, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global planetary defense collaboration, issued a memo. The good news is that 2024 YR4 is not a planet destroyer, nor a killer of dinosaurs. It may be a little like the asteroid that made a mess of a swath of Siberia in 1908. If it landed on or near (or exploded above) a city that city would be no more. An airburst would be equivalent to 500 Hiroshimas.
According to IAWM, 2024 YR4’s “impact risk” corridor is: “across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.”
This 1.9 percent is not a completely unalarming number, despite the efforts by various sources to stress there’s still a very slim chance that we will be hit.
On the Torino scale (no, I had never heard of it) it’s a level three:
A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of localized destruction. Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to Level 0. Attention by public and by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.
Things start to get tricky from level five, and level ten is really, really best avoided:
A collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean. Such events occur on average once per 100,000 years, or less often.
Levels eight and nine aren’t much fun either. All are reminders that we live in a dangerous, oblivious universe, hard facts, although more cheerful than the analysis offered up by Werner Herzog: “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
The good news is that we had another potentially unwelcome visitor, Apophis, an asteroid initially projected (in 2004) to have a 2.7 percent chance of striking Earth in 2029. That’s been reduced to zero, which is good to know, although it will come close enough to see in 2029 with the naked eye or binoculars.
Of course, if percentages can be scaled down, they can be scaled up.
I googled “National Review asteroid” to find, among other entries, Charlie Cooke surprised to hear of the size of an asteroid being described as “half a giraffe.”
He added:
It was about the what now? Since when, exactly, did we measure asteroids in giraffes? I’m no astronomer, but “a giraffe” seems to be an extremely odd way of measuring any item that is not, in fact, a giraffe.
And from 2021, who should show up but (one guess only) . . . Jack Butler, worried that NASA might have succumbed to hubris when it gave the all-clear on Apophis in 2029, 2036, and 2068:
Let’s hope this is correct, and that vengeful forces do not deem these predictions a form of hubris to be laid low. But let us also remember that this study only touches upon one asteroid; even a single impact could devastate the world, as has happened before. The universe is a big place. And someday we may learn something about it, and of our frightful position therein, that could be less optimistic than this study.
And then here am I from 2013, some months after a meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk in Russia injured hundreds:
We waste a fortune on measures (that will have no impact for decades, if ever) to tamper with the climate. Some of that money would be better spent on asteroid insurance.
We now do spend much more than we did. In 2019, spending reached $150m. In a test held in 2022, NASA’s DART successfully knocked a (harmless) asteroid onto a different orbit.
Writing in the Scientific American, British journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan argues that, if the odds of impact have not fallen by enough, that it might be best to deal with 2024 YR4 when it flies by in 2028. A “deflection mission” takes three to five years to design and build, so the clock’s a ticking. . . .
Elon. . . . Elon.