Odds of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the moon may rise to 30 per cent | Hacker News Reader

Odds of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the moon may rise to 30 per cent

newscientist.com

11 pointsbelter6 comments

> The asteroid has now flown out of view of Earth’s telescope, meaning astronomers thought there was no chance of gathering more information about its trajectory until it returns to view in 2028, which may not be enough time to plan and launch a deflection mission.

> But now it seems the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will have a brief glimpse at 2024 YR4 in February 2026, which will represent the last good chance to decide on a deflection mission

If it's a concern, wouldn't it make sense to start planning a launch now? The worst case scenario is that we spend a few million dollars testing things in case we have to deflect something from the Earth, which sounds pretty dang cheap to me. Load it up with both deflection tech & with scientific tech, and you still get an asteroid fly-by even if the deflection isn't necessary. (And heck, maybe we can deflect it anyway, even further from the moon, to test things regardless.)

Speculative development would be a problem in the quarterly account filing. Good idea on longer horizons yes.

deleted

The asteroid isn't big enough to change the trajectory of the Moon (negligible): https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/planetary-defense/2025/06/05/...

From what I've read, it's not that much of a concern yet. The immediate threat would be to orbital infrastructure, with debris burning up in the atmosphere. It would not change the trajectory of the moon. So, they can wait to get more info. If, by very small chance, 2024 YR impacted Earth in 2032, it would be localized disaster with enough time to move people out of the area of impact.

That being said, it's a good reason to work on asteroid deflection tech! Probably shouldn't waste it.

Non-paywalled link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251112125138/https://www.newsc...

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