The chance of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth increased by a fraction of a percent, NASA reported this week.
While a potential impact date is still nearly seven years away, scientists at NASA and their Sentry Earth Impact Monitoring system have found the chances of a direct hit with Earth have increased from 1.2% to 1.3% on Dec. 22, 2032.
Richard P. Binzel, astronomer and professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the increase is no cause for alarm.
"The difference between 1.2 percent and 1.3 percent doesn't matter," he told the Daily Mail on Friday. "Until the data are sufficient to pinpoint which of these two final answers is correct, we can expect the probability numbers to wobble around a bit. This is simply how scientific data measurements play out."
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered Dec. 27 at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile and is estimated to be 100- to 325-feet wide. It would cause catastrophic damage if it connected with any populated area.
Asteroids of similar size are estimated to strike the Earth every few thousand years.
Dr. Paul Chodas, director for the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said the asteroid has the size range comparable to a large building.
"If the asteroid turns out to be on the large end of its estimated size range, the impact could produce blast damage as far as 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the impact site," Chodas said. "But that's in the unlikely event that it might impact at all. The potential for damage arises because of the incredibly high speed (about 17 kilometers per second, or 38,028 miles per hour) at which the asteroid would enter the atmosphere."
NASA in recent years has tested how to disrupt an asteroid's trajectory so it misses Earth.
In November 2021, the agency launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket as the first test of a planetary defense system. In September 2022, DART successfully struck the moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didymous. The collision achieved its mission by altering the asteroid's orbit.