2024YR4 Collision Chance is now 1.9%

en.wikipedia.org

13 points·spectraldrift··4 comments

Wikipedia's source is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y...

It is currently moving away from us as it does its little dance around the sun. It will likely soon be too faint to see going forward until sometime in mid to late 2029, when we will likely see it again with NEO Surveyor, and likely the Vera Rubin LSST telescopes. It will spend most of that time with an apparent magnitude of probably fainter than 29. Once we spot it again in 2028/2029 time frame then there is a very high likely-hood that we will know its orbit well enough to know if it will miss or not (again, low, but not zero chance of impact).

You can view the current best fit orbit here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...

Source: I write asteroid orbit calculation code for my day job. What I say here is unrelated to my employers, and should not in any way be construed as any official statement.

Very cool! I am curious how the scientific community views this situation, as it's quite rare to detect something like this. I read the JWST might be able to image it, but couldn't find that information. Can you share more?

I cannot speak for the community, I don't have a very broad contact list for this sort of thing. Among the few people I know this has definitely drummed up some interest though (there are not nearly as many people who study asteroids as the public would think). Where JWST points is a complicated process that I only have a vague understanding of, this would likely require some kind of director discretionary time (I dont even know if JWST does that).

Perhaps we need ai to figure out if it’s actually going to hit

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