‘We monitor an average of 200-300 asteroids that safely pass Earth every month and the risk from 2024 YR4 in 2032 remains low,’ Angus Stewart, joint head of the UK National Space Operations Centre, told Metro.
It’s also large enough to warrant a rare impact warning from the International Asteroid Warning Network, a collective of observations, scientific organisations and space agencies – the UK’s own included.
YR4, which space officials believe could be as large as 300 feet, is expected to either impact or glide past Earth on December 22, 2032.
As scientists learned more about the asteroid as it whizzed towards us, they realised that it had next to no chance of coming anywhere near us for at least a century, so it tumbled down the Torino Scale to a zero.
The impact alert, issued on January 29, said the rock could fall somewhere ‘across the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia’.
