Posted on 02/02/2025 4:35:31 PM PST by Libloather
An asteroid with the power to unleash an explosion one hundred times greater than an atomic bomb has triggered global space agency alarms.
The odds that the space rock dubbed Y4, which is nearly the size of a football field at between 130 and 300 feet wide, could hit Earth is now too close to ignore, they warn.
“If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the environs,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, told Agence France-Presse last week.
The asteroid was first observed on December 27, 2024, from the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.
The assessment or risk continued to escalate through January 29 — that’s when the International Asteroid Warning Network released a memo on Y4’s threat.
Its sighting prompted a response from the US defenses at NASA. “You get observations, they drop off again. This one looked like it had the potential to stick around,” Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at NASA told AFP.
The likelihood of impact now stands at 1.6%, moving at a speed that would meet Earth by December 22, 2032.
Potential crash sites include the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia, per the IAWN memo.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
That’s a lot of boiled sea food.
Gonna need a lot of shrimp cocktail and tarter sauce...
And beer, lots of beer, likely a kegger or two.
What can we as individuals do?
We visited the meteor crater once back in the 90s. Had to pay $10 to look at a hole in the ground. The museum was mildly interesting. The space museum in Alamogordo is much bigger and better.
I have a picture of my wife sitting on some plumbing attached to some kind of large rocket motor (Saturn V?). It was taken at the musem in Alamogordo.
Looks like we might get rid of the Houthis.
I’m hoping it hits Mecca or Medina.
Thank God. We need some relief. This joint has gone nuts.
Weighs on the order of 10 million tons. It will certainly make a big bang, or big splash, should it hit at something like 20,000 miles per hour, if not faster.
Duck and cover.
We might not need the Panama Canal any more …
Small rock, big panic, large oceans.
Supposedly an asteroid caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. Maybe if another asteroid hits, it will bring back the dinosaurs.
Kewl! Dinosaurs? I could use the oil!
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