The European Space Agency (ESA) has revealed it is closely monitoring an asteroid the size of a football pitch that could hit the Earth in a little over seven years.
The asteroid, called 2024 YR4, is estimated to have a one in 83 chance of a direct hit, causing “severe damage to a local region”, according to ESA.
The space rock, which measures 100m by 40m, is currently at a distance of around 27 million miles and moving away from the planet. But its path will cross the Earth’s orbit on 22 December 2032.
Most likely there would be a near miss, with the asteroid passing within a few thousand miles.
The Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, which is chaired by ESA, will discuss the latest observations of the asteroid at a meeting in Vienna next week.
If the impact risk is confirmed it will make official recommendations to the United Nations and work may begin on options for a “spacecraft-based response to the potential hazard”, the agency said in a statement.
Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University, told Sky News: “We shouldn’t be overly worried – at least not just yet.
“That’s because our early detection systems quite often overestimate the likelihood of an impact with Earth.
“In the early stages, we can’t determine its trajectory very accurately, and so the probability of impact has to take into account this uncertainty.
“It’s likely that as our technologies for detecting Earth-bound objects improve, we may see an increasing number of alerts such as this.
“It’s important that we find the right balance between treating the threat seriously, but not over-reacting in these early stages of discovery when the trajectory is still not well-defined.”
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‘Protect our home planet’
Just over two years ago NASA smashed a spacecraft into the 160m-wide asteroid Dimorphos and successfully changed its orbit.
At the time NASA administrator Bill Nelson said: “All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it’s the only one we have.”
Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first spotted by a telescope in Chile. Since the start of January, astronomers have been tracking the asteroid to gauge its size and movement.
The asteroid is expected to fade from view within the next few months as it moves further from the Earth. Increasingly powerful telescopes will be trained on the rock to gather as much data as possible on its trajectory.
Once it disappears it won’t come back into view until 2028.
How much damage would such an impact do?
The Earth takes a direct hit from an asteroid of that size only once every few thousand years.
In 1908, a slightly smaller asteroid – thought to have measured 60m across – exploded over Siberia. It flattened 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles.
