ETIDIOH - NEW

Since near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 was first discovered in December 2024 , NASA and the worldwide planetary defense community have continued to observe the asteroid, which was ruled out as a significant impact risk to Earth . New infrared observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have decreased the uncertainty of the asteroid’s size and 2024 YR4 is now estimated to be 174-220 feet (53-67 meters), about the size of a 10-story building. The previous size estimate of 131-295 feet (40-90 meters) was derived from visible light measurements from ground-based telescopes.   (...) Experts at NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have updated 2024 YR4’s chance of impacting the Moon on Dec. 22, 2032 from 1.7% as of late February to 3.8% based on the Webb data and observations from ground-based telescopes. There is still a 96.2% chance that the asteroid will miss the Moon. In the small chance that the asteroid were to impact, it would n...

NASA analysis of a near-Earth asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, indicates it has a more than 1% chance of impacting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032 – which also means there is about a 99% chance this asteroid will not impact. Such initial analysis will change over time as more observations are gathered .   Currently, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1% .  Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first reported on Dec. 27, 2024, to the Minor Planet Center– the international clearing house for small-body positional measurements – by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System station in Chile.  The asteroid, which is estimated to be about 130 to 300 feet wide , caught astronomers’ attention when it rose on the NASA automated Sentry risk list on Dec. 31, 2024.  The Sentry list includes any known near-Earth asteroids that have a non-zero probability of impacting Earth in the future.   An object that reaches this level is not uncommon ; there have been several obj...