There’s an asteroid barreling toward Earth that could potentially hit us in the year 2032, the impact of which will involuntarily cause most of us to release a sigh of relief and a muttering of the word “finally.”
But those who aren’t open to receiving the sweet embrace of death just yet might be wondering: what can we do in the face of an Armageddon-level threat? Exactly what those fictional oil drillers did, of course. Nuke the ever-loving shit out of it. That’s astronomer Dr. David Whitehouse’s proposal, at least.
If Asteroid 2024 YR4 really wants to hit us in less than 10 years, it’s going to have to learn to dodge missiles. The asteroid currently measures around 100 m x 40 m, or roughly the size of a soccer field, and has a risk of impact estimated at one in 67, which is a little too high for my liking. To make matters worse, the asteroid will be out of sight by the year 2028, leaving us with a brief window to try to figure out what to do, should its trajectory send it toward us.
At least one global space organization, the European Space Agency, is going to hold discussions at an upcoming meeting on deflection options, should the asteroid decide it wants to mess with us.
Currently, one proposed measure that has been made public involves sending a spacecraft to the asteroid by the year 2028 to slightly change its orbit so that it misses Earth in 2032. The other publicly known option is to just blow it to hell and maybe mount its head on a spike on the moon to scare off other asteroids.
If changing an asteroid’s orbit sounds like pure science fiction, it’s actually not. NASA changed the orbit of an asteroid called Dimorphos back in 2022 by deliberately slamming a spacecraft into it, essentially slapping Dimorphos like the little punk that it was. Inelegant yet effective.
Let’s say we try that on Asteroid 2024 YR4 and it doesn’t work, what then? That’s when we break out the big guns. Potentially. It’s all theoretical for now and a final answer probably won’t be reached by a single space agency but rather a consensus from several working in tandem to come up with the solution that protects all earthly life.
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