Should we be worried about 2024 YR4 and is there anything the world can do about it?
The world has plenty of time to prepare for 2024 YR4, experts have stressed. And if needs be, there is one tried-and-tested means of altering an asteroid’s trajectory.
Rivkin led the investigation for NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission, which successfully nudged an asteroid off its course with a “kinetic impactor” strategy that involved a collision with a spacecraft.
The target asteroid posed no threat to Earth, making it an ideal test subject.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t work” again, he said. The bigger question is whether major nations would fund such a mission if their own territory was not under threat.
Other more experimental ideas exist.
Lasers could vaporise part of the asteroid to create a thrust effect, pushing it off course. A “gravity tractor”, a large spacecraft that slowly tugs the asteroid away using its own gravitational pull, has also been theorised.
China, meanwhile, has started assembling a planetary defence team to counter the threat of near-Earth asteroids.
Weeks after the asteroid’s discovery, a special projects centre at China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence posted a recruitment notice listing three available roles for a “planetary defence post”, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday.
The centre, which is responsible for aerospace engineering research and implementation and Earth observation, is recruiting graduates to study asteroid monitoring and create early warning methods, according to the notice posted last month on the WeChat account of the journal China Space Science and Technology.
China also has an existing conceptual plan for a mission to defend against a near-Earth asteroid. Unveiled in September 2024, the mission – which would be the first of its kind for China – aims to observe an asteroid and then hit it with a spacecraft to alter its path in around 2030, according to state media.
If all else fails, the long warning time means that authorities could evacuate the impact zone.
“Nobody should be scared about this,” said NASA’s Fast. “We can find these things, make these predictions and have the ability to plan.”
