[Image: Global Village Space / Facebook]
After a tumultuous start to the year, we’re all asking “What’s next?” Well, this.
A global defense plan has been launched after a hundred-metre-wide asteroid after being spotted by an automated telescope in Chile in December last year.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 has now been kicked to the top of the “impact risk list” after calculations revealed the massive space rock has a 1-in-83 chance of striking our little blue planet.
US and European space agencies have said that there is a 1.3% chance of smashing into Earth on 22 December 2032, or put another way, a nearly 99% probability of barrelling past without incident.
“Most likely this one will pass by harmlessly,” said Colin Snodgrass, a professor of planetary astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. “It just deserves a little more attention with telescopes until we can confirm that. The longer we follow its orbit, the more accurate our future predictions of its trajectory become.”
The asteroid has a Torino Impact Hazard Scale rating of three, signifying a close encounter that warrants astronomers’ attention since there is a 1% or greater risk of an impact in the next decade that would produce “localised destruction”.
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The Torino scale spans from zero, when there is no risk, to ten when a collision is unavoidable and threatens the future of civilisation as we know it.
