On February 18, NASA estimated that the asteroid 2024 YR4 had a 3.1 percent chance of hitting earth. But on February 21, NASA revised that prediction down to 0.28 percent. The revision is not a sign of sloppiness by NASA: newly discovered asteroids have highly uncertain trajectories, and predictions can change quickly as scientists collect more data.
The asteroid “is now more likely to hit the moon than Earth, according to the latest data,” Live Science says.
But if YR4 does hit the Earth, it “is capable of ‘regional devastation.”
Most objects that hit the Earth are much smaller than YR4. “A collision from an asteroid of this size would have been around a once-in-a-thousand-years event, based on a NASA asteroid hazard comparison chart.”
A NASA spacecraft recently made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
And a British spacecraft captured up-close images of Mercury.
Last year, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
In 2023, India and Japan became the fourth and fifth countries to achieve a soft landing on the moon.
