Odds Keep Going Up That A Warship-Sized Asteroid Will Smack Earth

Just when it seemed the world couldn’t possibly get more 2025: The odds keep shifting on whether a newly discovered asteroid big enough to wipe out an entire city will hit Earth.

In its latest update on asteroid 2024 YR4, as the 130-foot by 300-foot hunk of metallic rock is known, NASA said the chances it will smack Earth just before Christmas 2032 stand at about 3.1 percent, or odds of about 1 in 32.

The more optimistic view is there’s a nearly 97 percent chance that 2032 will come and go, and we’ll still be around to laugh about that time we dodged the “city killer” asteroid.

The worst-case-scenario predictions are that the asteroid could wipe out some of the world’s largest cities, risking the lives of 110 million people.

“If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the environs,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist for the nonprofit Planetary Society, told France’s AFP news agency.

Odds Of Strike Fluctuate

The odds of a catastrophic near-Earth object strike have increased over the past several weeks.

In January, NASA put the chances of the asteroid hitting our planet at around 1 percent. The chances grew to 2.3 percent in early February, and then to 3.1 percent in the agency’s Feb. 18 update.

The chance that we or something on Earth will be smashed to smithereens by an asteroid has never been greater than 1 percent, according to NASA.

But it will probably be OK.

The odds of a direct strike will almost certainly continue to go up and down as the asteroid’s path around the sun is better understood. The risk could drop to zero over the next seven years, according to Larry Denneau, senior software engineer with the University of Hawaii's asteroid impact alert system that first spotted the asteroid.

“You don’t have to be worried about anything. It’s a curiosity,” Denneau told The Associated Press. “Don’t panic. Let the process play out, and we’ll have a for-sure answer.”

The rising and falling probability of a strike is typical, scientists say.

“No one should be concerned that the impact probability is rising. This is the behavior our team expected,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in an email to The AP. “To be clear, we expect the impact probability to drop to zero at some point.”

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It’s The Size Of A Warship, Though

Still, this thing is freaky big, about the size of the USS Enterprise, the largest active warship in the world, or a skyscraper. If it hits, it’ll leave a mark.

And it is not as if it hasn’t happened before.

A meteor about 66 feet in diameter exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, damaging thousands of buildings and injuring hundreds of people.

And the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and caused the Chicxjulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula was about 5,000 feet wide.

We’ll know more about just how 2025 the asteroid threat may become in March.

That’s the last chance scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb Space Telescope will have to observe the near-Earth object before disappears from view until 2028.

2024 YR4 was discovered by a telescope over Chile in December. Asteroids are space rocks orbiting the sun that are considerably smaller than planets. Scientists believe they’re the leftovers from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.

Can NASA Deflect It?

Since the asteroid’s size and orbit are uncertain, it’s unclear where it might hit and what the possible impacts would be should it strike Earth.

If the asteroid is on the smaller end, the ESA said any potential impacts would be local similar to the Tunguska event that flattened thousands of square miles of forest in remote Siberia in 1908. But if it’s close to 330 feet “the consequences would be significantly worse,” the agency said.

Chodas said once Webb pinpoints the asteroid’s size, NASA can predict “how serious an impact this asteroid could produce and how difficult a task it might be to deflect this asteroid.”

NASA already has some experience nudging an asteroid.

The space agency’s Dart spacecraft deliberately rammed a harmless asteroid in 2022 in the first planetary defense test of its kind, altering its orbit around its larger companion asteroid.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.