2024 YR4 is currently headed away from Earth, and by April it will have travelled too far us to see from the ground - meaning that anything we don’t know about the asteroid will likely stay unknown until it comes back around in 2028, at which point it may be too late.
But the world has been working on a range of new options to help save us from possible impacts - such as Nasa’s successful Dart mission, which successfully showed it would be possible to nudge an asteroid off course - and those efforts would likely increase if there was seen to be a genuine threat.
Even at its relatively high rating on a different hazard scale - the Palermo rating - 2024 YR4 is still given a negative rating, which means there is more chance that we will be hit by an unknown object than by this known one.
If 2024 YR4 were to hit us, then its size would mean that it would be a localised event, rather than the total destruction that was wrought by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, for instance.
The highest-ranking goes to an asteroid known as Apophis - a destructive character of Egyptian myth, which did not help its reputation - which achieved the highest ranking in 2004 but was quickly downgraded as scientists learned more about its route and calculated that it did not actually pose a threat at all.
