What Happens if Asteroid 2024 YR4 Hits the Moon?
If I offered you odds of 1 in 3 to win the lottery, you’d take it right?
Good odds.
But what, if there was a 1 in 3 chance of an asteroid hitting the moon?
Context is everything right?
Asteroid 2024 YR4 – a name like that just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it… is classed as a near earth object (NEO) it is approximately 53 – 67 m wide, or about the same size as a 15 storey building. It briefly hit the headlines at the start of 2025 when it was calculated to have a 1 in 32 chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
This, predictably, briefly sent the media into a small nuclear meltdown as commentators started to imagine ‘Armageddon’ style missions to destroy or deflect it. Further research has, however, since downgraded the threat of an Earth impact significantly to pretty much zero. There does remain a relatively high chance of it impacting the lunar surface in 2032 though.
Big deal, right?
Wrong.
Any decent size object that impacts the Moon (for example an asteroid the size of the Leaning tower of Pisa) could generate significant debris that would be thrown up into space. This could damage lunar infrastructure or even cause significant problems in Low Earth Orbit, the location of many critical satellites used by you and me everyday.
NASA Image of Asteroid 2024 YR4
The best data we have today suggests a 1 in 25 chance of that happening but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is being tasked to observe the asteroid in February 2026, and these observations could shorten the odds to as little as 1 in 3.
However, even if this is the outcome we would have plenty of time to plan a deflection mission using the approach tested on the NASA DART mission in 2023. DART collided a spacecraft with the asteroid Dimorphos to test if the energy of the impact could redirect or influence, the asteroids orbit.
And it did.
So, the good news is there’s no need to go rushing to build a dystopic future proof retreat just yet. Even if the asteroid does impact the Moon, there is a less than 1% chance it will affect life on Earth, and any impact is more likely to be limited to a small communication blip rather than the existential event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago!
#Armageddon #Asteroid #Asteroid2024YR4 #Astronomy #Astrophysics #DART #Dimorphos #ESA #LEO #Lunar #Meteorite #Moon #NASA #Science #Space
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