- READ MORE: Could NASA Prevent the 2024 YR4 Asteroid from Impacting Earth in 2032?
has provided a significant update on the "city-destroying" asteroid that has been hurtling towards Earth – and it's finally good news.
The space agency has finally announced that the asteroid 2024 YR4 now poses a virtually zero risk of impacting the planet in 2032, following months of escalating concerns.
The chances of the asteroid making landfall on Earth on December 22, 2032, stand at one in 26,000, according to NASA's Sentry impact monitoring system.
Fortunately, that signifies there is a 99.9961 percent probability that the space rock will glide harmlessly by Earth.
The news will come as a welcome development to the world's planetary defense organizations, which have been preparing to
Prior to this unexpected downgrade, the 2024 YR4 triggered alarm bells at the world's space agencies as
Asteroid 2024 YR4, considered the "riskiest" ever detected, temporarily received a rare score of three on the Torino Scale, a measure of the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEOs).
The asteroid's Torino rating has been revised to zero, signifying that it no longer poses a threat to Earth.
The asteroid 2024 YR4, which was discovered in December of the previous year, rapidly rose to the top of the list of potentially hazardous space objects compiled by NASA and the European Space Agency.
Initial calculations indicated that there was a slight possibility of the near-Earth object passing close to the planet within the next decade.
Truly sparked concern when it
The likelihood of the asteroid's impact continued to increase throughout February, peaking at a one-in-32 chance last week.
A projected diameter of 54 meters (177 feet), roughly the height of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, suggests that a collision with 2024 YR4 would have resulted in severe destruction.
NASA estimates that asteroid 2024 YR4 has the potential to unleash an explosion equivalent to nearly eight megatons of TNT - more than 500 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Researchers propose that the explosion might be comparable to the Tunguska Asteroid impact, which flattened an area of approximately 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of Siberian forest in 1908.
If it were to strike a densely populated area, the consequences could potentially lead to millions of fatalities.
However, after reaching their peak, the likelihood of an impact has now dropped significantly.
By February 21, the asteroid's impact probability had dropped to one in 360, or 0.28 percent.
As fresh observations continued to arrive over the weekend, NASA has now further reduced those probabilities to an extremely small 0.0039 percent.
With a new Torino Scale rating of zero, this indicates that NASA no longer considers the 2024 YR4 asteroid to pose any threat to the Earth.
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