Forward-looking: Do 1 in 83 seem like high odds? They usually would, but as those are the chances that a newly discovered asteroid will slam into the Earth in 2032, you'd be forgiven for wishing that second number were a lot higher.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on December 25, 2024, when it was around 515,116 miles away from Earth.
Half a million miles away doesn't sound like the asteroid is anything to worry about. But it has a rating of three on the Torino risk scale. This means that an asteroid or comet has a 1% or greater chance of impacting Earth, causing localized destruction. This rating is used for objects that are large enough to cause significant regional damage if they were to impact.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 1.2% chance of hitting our planet in 2032. The object is 180 feet across, around half the size of a football field, and if it were to hit us, the impact speed would be an estimated 10.76 miles per second.
While the impact wouldn't be world-ending, the asteroid-launcher website suggests that the damage could be significant. With New York as the impact site, calculations show it exploding 2.8 miles above ground with the force of 12 megatons of TNT. 3.4 million people would die from the fireball, and almost 7 million people would receive second- or third-degree burns. Buildings within 5.4 miles would collapse, and nearly all trees within 8 miles would be knocked down.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near Earth Object Studies writes that Asteroid 2024 YR4 has six possible impact events between 2032 and 2074. The one with the highest likelihood of impact will be on December 22, 2032.
There is some good news, though. Level three on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale has the caveat that "Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to Level 0," which is no hazard rating.
EarthSky notes that the only asteroid ever to have a higher score on the Torino scale was 99942 Apophis, which briefly had a rating of 4 on the Torino Scale in late 2004. It is now rated zero on the scale, though it wiped out most of humanity on August 23, 2029, in id Software's FPS Rage.
An asteroid half the size of a football field has a 1-in-83 chance of hitting Earth in 2032
