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NASA have made a key emergency decision surrounding the threat of 2024 YR4 - a 'city-killer' asteroid currently on a path towards Earth - as the chances of impact continue to rise.
The eyes of the space world are keenly trained on 2024 YR4, a roughly 300 foot wide asteroid that despite being around 27 million miles away, could end up crashing into Earth in less than a decade.
It's estimated that this particular asteroid could hold the capacity to wipe out an entire city if it did happen to collide with Earth, and current projections indicate that it'll land somewhere between South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
When 2024 YR4 was first discovered in December 2024 scientists predicted that it only had roughly a 1% chance of striking Earth, but recent recalculations have bumped this figure up to 2.3%, which is over double and has began to worry many people.
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While some famous physicists have theorized that humanity should already be preparing preventative measures to divert the course of the asteroid before it risks striking our planet - similar to that shown in the DART program a few years ago - NASA have made their own emergency decisions to further understand the danger at hand, as reported by the Metro.
As outlined by the European Space Agency, NASA are currently using the James Webb Telescope - which is the most powerful of its kind - to study 2024 YR4, which is especially important as we only have a few more months before it disappears from view until 2028.
Current scientists are using light reflected from the Sun to analyze the asteroid, but the Webb telescope would be able to use a MIRI instrument to study infrared light emitting from YR4 itself, which will give a far more accurate reading and image of the threat.
"Knowing its orbit will only tell us if the asteroid could impact Earth, not how significant an impact could be," explains the ESA, yet with this new style of analysis we could get a much stronger reading of the size which will greatly benefit future predictions.
As the ESA illustrate: "It is very important that we improve our size estimate for 2024 YR4: the hazard represented by a 40m asteroid is very different from that of a 90m asteroid."
It unfortunately won't be until early March that scientists can begin using the James Webb Telescope to study 2024 YR4 though, with a second round of analysis being conducted in May.
The latter information will be particularly helpful as it'll hopefully provide readable differences in heat after the asteroid has moved further away from the Sun, which will in turn inform measurements of velocity and orbit.
