Asteroid 2024 YR4 Is On Collision Course With The Moon And Could Fire Shrapnel At Earth | New...

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The asteroid 2024 YR4, which was once thought to be on a collision course with Earth , may still pose a threat to the planet. There is still a chance the space rock could smash into the moon, and the resulting explosion could shower Earth with a cloud of satellite-destroying shrapnel.

The chance of a collision with the moon , however, has slowly been increasing, and now stands at 4.3 per cent based on the last observations taken before the asteroid flew out of view of our telescopes until 2028. And according to Paul Wiegert at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and his colleagues, such a collision could still cause significant damage to Earth's satellites.

"We were a little bit surprised at the possibility of there being a substantial amount of material at the Earth," says Wiegert. "Intuitively, the Earth is actually quite a small target when seen from the moon, and so your intuition is that not very much material would actually hit the Earth, but it turns out that the Earth's gravity can focus that material under certain conditions."

While these collisions might not be enough to take out entire satellites, they could cause anomalous readings due to electrical flashes, though it is hard to model exactly how damaging it will be for satellites, says Wiegert.