City-Killing Asteroid's Odds To Strike Earth Increased To 1 In 32

If you have anything planned for 2032, an asteroid might be screaming toward the planet to clear your calendar. The near-Earth object, designated 2024 YR4, now has a 1 in 32 chance of slamming into Earth after NASA published new data on Tuesday. While slightly worse odds than the 1 in 43 odds reported last week, experts emphasized that the odds are likely to increase before plummeting to zero.

To give you the late 1990s disaster movie exposition upfront, 2024 YR4 is somewhere between 130 to 300 feet in diameter and weighs approximately 458 million pounds. According to the New York Times, there are several major population centers along the estimated area of impact: Bogotá, Colombia, Lagos, Nigeria, and Mumbai, India. The asteroid would obliterate any of the cities it impacts, killing at least 10 million people. There would be enough warning to organize evacuations, but hopefully, the asteroid won't hit the planet at all.

It's difficult to picture the potential devastation caused by an astronomically-scaled natural disaster. France24 reported:

"Its potential devastation comes less from its size and more from its velocity, which could be nearly 40,000 miles per hour if it hits."

If it enters Earth's atmosphere, the most likely scenario is an airburst, meaning it would explode midair with a force of approximately eight megatons of TNT — more than 500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Typically, meteorites that reach the surface aren't large enough to destroy a city. They might break a potted plant or shatter a windshield. Earlier this year, a meteorite strike was caught on camera for the first timein Canada. Coming home after walking his dogs, a man found a small bit of debris in front of his door. After reviewing the footage from his Ring door camera, he soon realized that it was a meteorite. The impact looked like a small puff of dust, a far cry from what a city-killing asteroid would do.

NASA and the rest of the planet will likely not just sit back and watch. The agency has dipped its toes into plans to save the planet from a potential asteroid strike. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) saw a spacecraft launched and intentionally rammed into an asteroid. The mission was deemed a success after the DART spacecraft shortened the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos, so we know what we'll have to do if the day comes.