The European Space Agency (ESA) has reduced the risk of asteroid on Monday 2024 YR4 for the first time in three days. The rock, the size of a building and located 60 million kilometers away, has a 2% risk of colliding against the Earth on December 22, 2032. The percentage somewhat less than 2.4% than The agency maintained since Friday. Is this a trend change? Are we already on the road to salvation?
Well, probably yes, although it is too early to say it. “The expected thing is that the percentage of risk oscillated in the next few days, increasing and descending successively, with a general downward trend until the rock no longer involves a problem,” José María Madiedo, of the Institute of Astrophysics, tells the Institute of Astrophysics from Andalusia (IAA-CSIC). NASA provides similar data and coincides with that in which it is an extremely low possibility.
The terrestrial telescopes involved with the international asteroid warning network will continue to observe the asteroid while still visible until April, after which it will be too weak to observe it until around June 2028. The NASA James Webb space telescope will also observe it In March to better evaluate its size. It is currently estimated that the asteroid is between 40 and 90 meters wide.
As more observations from the asteroid orbit are obtained, its probability of impact will be better known. It is possible that 2024 YR4 be discarded as an impact danger, as has happened with many other objects that have previously appeared in the asteroid risk list. This is what happened with the asteroid Apofis, discovered in 2004, which granted up to a chilling 4% chance of colliding against the earth in 2029 “and then going down to zero in the following months,” recalls the astrophysicist. “There is nothing that makes us think that 2024 YR4 will not behave the same,” he says. As the European Space Agency (ESA) recalls, the probability of impact of an asteroid usually increases at the beginning, before falling quickly to zero after additional observations.
Great uncertainty
However, as for the moment the observations are limited, “uncertainty remains great,” which is why the UN surveillance protocol continues to apply, which will not be withdrawn until the probability is less than 1%. The two reaction groups against asteroids approved by the UN, the international asteroid alert network (IAWN), chaired by NASA, and the Space Missions Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG), chaired by ESA, closely follow the Roca trajectory. They would be responsible for establishing a mitigation strategy if necessary, either evacuating a concrete region of the planet or sending a ship that collided with the rock and diverting it.
According to the NASA planetary defense department, there is currently no other asteroid known with an impact probability of more than 1%. 2024 YR4 has one of the greatest impact risks ever observed for an object of this size.
In case of impact, the asteroid is not large enough to trigger a global catastrophe, but it could completely devastate a large city or cause damage to the regional level. Its explosion in the air would release an energy equivalent to about 8 megatons (8 million tons of dynamite), more than 500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
#reduces #impact #risk #asteroid #YR4 #time #days #path #salvation
