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.
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.
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.
I have separate filter lists for both, posts and comments but I need to keep adding new ones every day. I guess "Mar a lago" is the one I'm adding today.
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.