In emergency decision, James Webb telescope will study 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 before its close approach to Earth
In emergency decision, James Webb telescope will study 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 before its close approach to Earth
In a rare "time-critical" decision, the James Webb Space Telescope will study the true size of the "potentially hazardous" asteroid 2024 YR4 twice over the next few months. The asteroid has a roughly 2.3% chance of impacting Earth in 2032.
Ngl at this point I’m rooting for the space rock
The space rock is likely not going to hit earth. If it does it's unlikely to hit land. If it does, it's unlikely to hit major population centers.
If it defies all odds and does that, it's going to happen in a location that is already struggling, and not in an area that's causing the suffering.
Hopefully it doesn't hit republic city, the Maga people will fill the media with " the deep state controlled it "
Whoever had “city killer asteroid” on their bingo card you can check it off now.
2.3% Got my hopes up for a second there
Hell, I got excited when I saw it was that high.
in 2032
FUCK.
The way things are going down here I'm cheering for the asteroid tbh.
Even if it's at the top end of the predicted range, an impact would be ~40MT equivalent. Enough to level a city, but not an extinction event by any means; plus the likely impact path is across central America, the Atlantic, central Africa and north India - not really regions that have the resources to respond to a threat like this. Personally I'm hoping it misses, because I don't see the counties that could do something about it stepping up right now, so you'd be looking at maybe 100 million people displaced from their homes and an insurmountable humanitarian crisis
It goes without saying that this is all because of <enter your deity name here> disapproval of <enter your hated group here>.
And the flyby is a test of 'deity's' approval of our next actions. Either way we should immediately lower taxes on the rich.
/s
I'm Indian and I'm OK with this hitting North India lol
Or Pakistan
Either is fine.
What happens if it crashes into Sahara? Do we get glass desert?
Came here to remark, “In hopes they can steer it at us?”
🤞
I swear the last time I saw news about this asteroid a week or less ago it was like 1.9%
Yes, they reassessed and found it more likely to hit.
I don't like this 2 point trend line given how much time we have lol
Finally, some good news in the current media cycle
Can it direct the asteroid to mar a Lago?
Or at the people forcing politics into every-single-discussion.
Well, this administration has been forcing politics into NASA by cutting funding and making all female/POC/LGBT employees unsafe/invisible. It’d be lovely if NASA was free from politics, but as we saw from Trumps last appointment of the totally unqualified Bridenstone, politics is shoving its ugly dick into science.
politics has an ugly way of forcing itself into your life, if you don't already think about it.
Unfortunately in a worst case scenario this gets very political, if we do something about it in advance an impactor probe should do the job, if we decide to play the 1/50 odds and lose then the most effective short notice method is a nuke. Not a direct strike but a near detonation which vaporizes a section of the surface of the object with the outgoing plasma effectively functioning as a massive thruster. Actually doing this is not trivial but not hard either (from an engineering standpoint), the tricky part would be actually managing to launch it without every nation on earth that happens to have a beligerant leader saber rattling and stone walling the prospect of a launch until its too late even for a nuke to do any good.
Ok, whatever dude.
I don't believe it is a possible target given how the orbital disk of the asteroid intersects with the surface of the earth. That's of we don't change the orbit, if we decide that is necessary, we'll probably try to get a complete miss instead of just changing the impact site.
DON'T LOOK UP
DC, please. Move all the good museums and historical stuff first, but don't tell the administration.
For those interested in how they come up with the impact probabilities and why it's really important that JWST is looking at this, Scott Manley did a great video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Esk1hg2knno
Yeah, great video. Deflecting it seems surprisingly doable if the will is there.
I like how he brought up the fact that if we try and fail, then what? What happens if NASA bumps it just enough to push it from Africa to India?
Xcom programmers say the asteroid has a roughly 2.3% chance of impacting Earth in 2032.
So it's a sure thing!
An impact from such a rock wouldn't trigger a mass extinction like the much larger, dino-snuffing Chicxulub impactor did 66 million years ago. But an asteroid that size could wreak regional havoc similar to the Tunguska impactor that flattened some 80 million trees in the Siberian wilderness in 1908
The difference from the movie is that we should just end it already and force the asteroid to collide specifically to destroy us.
There's a study that says the effects of an impact landing in water won't be as bad as thought.
Also there is a way of using nukes to detonate adjacent to an asteroid or comet that slows it down without a risk of fracturing it. The heat turns the surface red hot and makes it shoot out mass and slows it down more. So we can stop basically any asteroid as long as we see it.
Don’t look up
But we might be able to mine it for trillions. Think of all the cell phones we could make!
That's like a new model every 3 to 6 months!
Cricket.
in 2032
Can someone tell it to hurry up already?
It makes a close pass in 2028, around the new year. Give it a wave and say hello.
Spoilers: it looks like a big rock
I got the image from James Webb early.
Spoiler
Here's my nominee to head up the "study"
Things have been so wacky I think we need bingo cards for global events. We could charge for them and give bingo winners some of the proceeds.
I’d be interested to see if they can capture it, rather than deflect the asteroid. We need to work on space-based manufacturing anyway, and it’d be convenient if we could get this thing parked at a Lagrange point for research and practice.
Hey can this thing swing by and grab Apophis and hurry the fuck up?
Apophis missed the keyhole, so no chance of impact this century, sorry. It would be a much bigger event, too, about 10-30 times the energy.
But, this noise does remind me of 2004.
What a waste
https://imgur.com/QvgHU1m
