Is this NEO the one? Yup, as in, a 1% chance of hitting us ... sadly
Astronomers reckon a 220-million-kilogram asteroid is going to swing by Earth in 2032 with a 1-in-100 chance of hitting us.
On Christmas Day, a NASA-operated robot telescope was taking in the night sky in Chile when it caught sight of an object that activated the space agency's Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System. This prompted scientists to investigate, and two days later, they figured whatever it was, it was zooming away from our home world – but on a trajectory could bring it back our way.
If it were to whack into our planet, it would be like an eight-mega-ton TNT bomb going off, about 500 times larger than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, we're told. Gaze upon the terrifying dot in the video below, captured by a European telescope in Chile, for it is the asteroid in question. And 2024 YR4 be its name.
Information on 2024 YR4 is still being collated. We do know for now that the space rock is thought to be 40 to 90 metres in diameter – as wide as 886 standard four-inch cans of spam laid end to end – and is moving away from Earth at 17.32 km/s . It'll stay in sight from our planet until April before disappearing around the Sun and won't be seen again until 2028..
Practically speaking, though, astronomers estimate there's only a 1.3 percent chance of 2024 YR4 hitting us. The orbital track suggests it'll fly some distance above the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia. That distance hasn't been shared yet; it's likely to be comfortably large, it may be quite uncomfortably small.
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