In just two months, we’ve learned that a ‘city-destroying’ asteroid, roughly the size of the Statue of Liberty, may be slowly hurtling toward our planet.There is a 1-in-43 chance that the massive space rock, dubbed ‘2024 YR4,’ could collide with Earth in 2032. While it may seem like we have plenty of time to devise a plan to protect humanity, some experts believe it might already be too late.Now, nine countries have been identified as being at risk of collision with the asteroid, which astronomers believe would create a mid-air explosion upon entering our atmosphere. The impact could be as destructive as eight million tons of TNT, causing devastation within a 30-mile radius.Currently, David Rankin, an engineer with NASA’s Catalina Sky Survey Project, has mapped out a ‘risk corridor,’ predicting the asteroid could collide anywhere from northern South America, across the Pacific Ocean, southern Asia, the Arabian Sea, and Africa.This means the nine countries at risk of impact—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador—could bear the brunt of the catastrophe.
Could 2024 YR4 crash into Earth in 2032?
Dr. Robin George Andrews, a scientist and author of How to Kill an Asteroid, took to Twitter to warn about the dangers that could arise if humanity attempted to launch a rocket into space to knock the asteroid off its projected path.”Nobody wants to accidentally ‘disrupt’ an asteroid because its fragments could still head toward Earth. As I often say, it’s like turning a cannonball into a shotgun spray,” he wrote about the asteroid currently orbiting Earth.”But we won’t see it again until another Earth flyby in 2028. A lot could go wrong if we attempt to hit it with something like DART [Double Asteroid Redirection Test—the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by altering an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact].”
Dr Robin George Andrews believes the best possible defense could be to just allow the asteroid to hit Earth and evacuate the area
“It may be smaller or larger. If it’s too big, we may not be able to deflect it with just one spacecraft. We’d need several to hit it perfectly—without catastrophically breaking it apart.”He continued on the social media platform: “And with only a few years left, we could accidentally deflect it—but not enough to make it miss the planet. Instead, it could still hit Earth, just in a different location that wasn’t originally at risk.”Andrews also suggested that, in this case, the best possible defense might simply be to let it crash into us while evacuating everyone in the impact zone beforehand.”Asteroid 2024 YR4 isn’t likely to be a problem at all; it’ll probably miss Earth. But if it doesn’t, we need to be cautious about trying to save the world while accidentally making the problem worse. Maybe, this time, we’ll just have to get out of the asteroid’s way,” he added.
