The odds keep growing that an asteroid big enough to wipe out a city will collide with Earth in seven years, according to NASA.
But the chance of an actual impact is still quite slim.
NASA first discovered “2024 YR4,” the 130-to-300-foot-wide asteroid, in December 2024, and found it only had roughly a 1 percent chance of impacting Earth on its trajectory, NewsNation’s Los Angeles affiliate KTLA reported.
On Jan. 27, the asteroid surpassed a 1 percent chance of hitting Earth, an “important threshold,” according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Currently, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1%,” NASA said in a press release.
On Feb. 7, the asteroid’s chances of hitting our planet grew to 2.3 percent, and as of Feb. 18, there’s a 3.1 percent chance that 2024 YR4 will impact Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. This means the odds are now one in 32.
There is a 96.9 percent chance that the asteroid will miss Earth, though NASA said this rare asteroid has a significant risk now, rating it at Torino Scale 3, a ranking of potential impacts.
“In the unlikely event that 2024 YR4 is on an impact trajectory, the impact would occur somewhere along a risk corridor which extends across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia,” JPL said in a release.
NASA said its James Webb Space Telescope will observe the asteroid in March 2025 “to better assess the asteroid’s size.”
