NASA makes emergency call as odds of ‘city-killing’ asteroid striking Earth increase

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NASA is training humanity’s most powerful telescope on a “city-killing” asteroid to determine whether or not we need to brace for deep impact.

Dubbed 2024 YR4, the building-sized space rock reportedly has a 1-in-43 chance of slamming into Earth in 2032 — up from about 1%

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With this “time-critical” threat potentially on our doorstep, the space agency has enlisted the aid of the James Webb telescope to study 2024 YR4 and gauge how much damage it would cause if it did strike our planet, per a blog post by the European Space Agency.

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Based on these calculations, a strike by YR4 would cause roughly the same amount of damage as the Tunguska event, which laid waste to around 80 million trees in Siberia in 1908, according to Space.com.

However, as these estimates are based on terrestrial telescope data, they only see sunlight reflected off the asteroid’s surface, providing them a limited picture of the cosmic body.

In reality, the asteroid could be much larger.

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