Gerrard Kaonga
The asteroid that had people fearful for their lives is now very unlikely to strike the planet,... but scientists reveal it could still pose a very real threat.
There was certainly asteroid fear-frenzy bubbling about earlier this year, with many fearful of what could become of the planet thanks to asteroid 2024 YR4.
It was described as ‘city destroying’, and was only discovered by NASA in late 2024. The space agency has been tracking it ever since.
While the fears of collision with the planet were always very low (we are talking less than 5%), NASA's latest announced the percentage chance of collision had fallen to as low as 0.004 percent as of February 2025.
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The space agency said in a statement: "As observations of the asteroid continued to be submitted to the Minor Planet Center, experts at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL’s) Center for Near-Earth Object Studies were able to calculate more precise models of the asteroid’s trajectory and now have updated its impact probability on Dec. 22, 2032 to only 0.004% and found there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century."
But with that said, that doesn’t mean planet Earth is completely out of the woods just yet.
Astronomers have said there still remains a 4.3 percent chance that the 60-meter asteroid could slam into the moon around late 2032. This collision could shower Earth with a wave of shrapnel, and this would cause major issues for satellites in orbit.
Dr Paul Wiegert, of the University of Western Ontario created simulations regarding this possibility and spoke of why it could be a pretty big problem.
Speaking to New Scientist, he said: “We were a little bit surprised at the possibility of there being a substantial amount of material at the Earth.
“Intuitively, the Earth is actually quite a small target when seen from the moon, and so your intuition is that not very much material would actually hit the Earth, but it turns out that the Earth’s gravity can focus that material under certain conditions.”
Wiegart and his team calculated that the asteroid could create a kilometre-wide crater on the moon and this would be the largest lunar impact for at least the past 5000 years.
In the grand scheme of things it is relatively small compared with a typical crater... so that's good, I suppose.
But this would eject a whole lot of debris into space and damage the satellites the equivalent of what would be expected over decades, in just a few days.
Let’s hope no one needs the internet that day, if this happens.