NASA says there’s a 99.9983% chance the asteroid will safely go past Earth in seven years.
NASA said the chance of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032 has dropped from 3.1% to almost zero. It now has only a 0.0017% chance of striking Earth in December 2032. The European Space Agency gave a similar risk of 0.002%.
NASA also said there’s a 99.9983% chance the asteroid will safely pass Earth in seven years, which is like a 1 in 59,000 chance of a collision. The new data shows there’s a 1.7% chance the asteroid could hit the moon, but Earth is not at risk with such small odds.
“When first discovered, asteroid 2024 YR4 had a very small, but notable chance of impacting our planet in 2032,” NASA shared on Monday.
NASA also mentioned, “As observations of the asteroid continued to be submitted to the Minor Planet Center, experts at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies were able to calculate more precise models of the asteroid’s trajectory and now have found there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century.”
This means that after studying the asteroid more, scientists have found that it is very unlikely to hit Earth, even for the next 100 years.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been tracking the asteroid, which passes Earth every four years. Several telescopes are studying the asteroid to learn more about its size and path. This will likely show a smaller chance of it hitting Earth in 2032 than what the current data suggests.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first reported on December 27, 2024, to the Minor Planet Centre, which is the official group for tracking small planets.
The asteroid is about 130 to 300 feet wide, big enough to potentially destroy a city. It first got attention when it appeared on NASA’s automated Sentry risk list on December 31, 2024. The Sentry list includes any near-Earth asteroids that have some chance of hitting Earth in the future.
In the past, some objects that appeared on this list later dropped off as more information came in.
