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Earlier this year, NASA issued a statement about a “city-killer” asteroid (2024 YR4) that they said had a 1.2% chance of slamming into Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. That percentage has been revised up and down multiple times since then, but now scientists believe it has the highest chance of actually colliding with the Moon instead: 4.3%.
While it is certainly good news that asteroid 2024 YR4, which is estimated to be about 131 to 295 feet wide, won’t be crashing into Earth, the giant space rock smashing into the Moon won’t happen without consequences.
That’s because it had been reported that if asteroid 2024 YR4 were to hit Earth it would release around 8 megatons of energy, or more than 500 times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. Obviously, similar amounts of energy would be released if 2024 YR4 hits the moon.
Which, according to a study published to the preprint server arXiv and recently submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, means that if 2024 YR4 hits the side of the moon facing Earth, it would send a significant amount of the 220 million pounds of debris caused by the collision zooming towards our planet. Some of that debris would then be pulled in by Earth’s gravity, creating a “spectacular” meteor shower.
The smallest of these tiny meteors would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but as lead study author Paul Wiegert of Canada’s University of Western Ontario pointed out to AFP, “A centimeter-sized rock traveling at tens of thousands of meters per second is a lot like a bullet.”
Those meteor “bullets” will have the capability of destroying multiple satellites. And based on the amount of them that could be created by asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the moon, it could be up 10 1,000 times more likely than normal that a satellite could be damaged.
The researchers concluded, based on their study of simulations, that “planetary defense considerations should be more broadly extended to cis-lunar space and not confined solely to near-Earth space.”