Look! Up in the Sky!
A Frog?!
Hello Friends,
It's time to call Bruce and Ben. Or maybe Underdog. Just to see if they will be available in a few years.
In case you haven’t heard—we found one:
The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/thanks-to-nasa-you-probably-wont-have-to-worry-about-this-asteroid-killing-you/
That's right, we actually have a NASA program that hunts for killer asteroids, and they spotted one.
It seems asteroid 2024 YR4 is going to do a close fly-by in 2028, and then it will come even closer to Earth around Christmas in 2032.
Current estimates give it between a 1% and 2% chance of hitting Earth.
Our planet gets pummeled by space rocks all the time. Most of them disintegrate in the atmosphere. A few wind up on someone's doorbell or car camera.
These photo bombs are smaller than an SUV. Space is filled with little things flying around. You can see a shooting star any night if you look hard enough.
A bus-sized meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk back in 2013. And a big one, estimated to be ~200 feet wide, decimated an extensive region of Siberia in 1908.
I'm not sure why Russia seems to be a popular landing spot for celestial wrecking balls.
Asteroid 2024 YRA is similarly sized to the Siberian rock. Current calculations have it being somewhere between a basketball court and a football field—large enough to cause extensive damage if it were to explode over a city.
This new space visitor is so large, in fact, that it triggered an established early warning system at a level 3 out of 10. The group that issues these warnings is part of the United Nations, called the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group—SMPAG.
So, we are officially on alert.
The truth of the matter, at least from where we sit here in 2025, is that, more likely than not, this old space boulder is simply going to fly by us.
But, a 2% chance is not zero, especially considering all the factors involved:
space is vast
it's hard to actually know the size of stuff so far away
figuring out an accurate trajectory of a zooming space object is always a challenge
humans make mistakes (that’s why we use pencils and erasable white boards).
Over the coming months, as a lot of sciencey / mathy people will keep their eyes on the skies.
The 2% could grow or shrink.
The really fun part is that 2024 YRA going to disappear from view for a while, and we won't be able to actually check up on it until it comes close to Earth again in 2028…
Sneak attack?
I've always thought that these space events—killer asteroids, aliens, destructive solar eruptions, Godzilla—are only on our minds because of hubris. It's like seeing the new car model you just bought everywhere. Things appear when our attention turns to them.
Why should any of these events happen now, during our lifetimes, when we measure the universe's time on a multi-billion year scale?
But then, could just be our karma.
In fact, since I started this post, the odds of an impact have gone up slightly, -2.3% (that’s 1/43).
Several days later…
Yesterday, this—there is a (slight) chance that 2023 YRA smashes into the moon instead of Earth—a scenario played out in Neal Stephenson's Seveneves.
For reals, it's not likely. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a doomsayer. So, put away your end-of-the-world Bacchanalia. Don’t go looking for a friend. (I mean, you can never have enough friends.)
Besides, a killer asteroid is a great distraction from other bombastic news exploding all around us every minute these days.
Just saying.
You can all sleep safely tonight knowing that people have their eyes on it.
Unless, of course, DOGE cuts the programs that are tracking it, or the government decides they don't want to tell us the truth, as in the movie, Don't Look Up.
That wouldn't happen, right? …You can’t handle the truth!
At least we can keep our eyes on it.
Happy watching, happy reading, and happy writing.
David