Asteroid Might Slam Into The Moon And Earthlings Will be Able to Watch

NASA estimates that asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 4.3 percent chance of hitting our lunar neighbour and adding yet another crater to its surface. But this time we will get to see it happen.

The moon could soon have another crater

Early last year, you might recall another asteroid caught the attention of scientists, and then the public, because its chances of hitting Earth in the near future climbed to a mildly alarming 3.1 percent. Happily, the calculations revealed the chances had quickly dropped to near zero, as some experts had predicted. So, we could all relax again.

Now, a less dangerous scenario is developing. While the Earth is in the clear, the moon might be in asteroid 2024 YR4’s line of fire on 22 December 2032. NASA currently puts the odds of a lunar impact at 4.3 percent. The European Space Agency (ESA) reckons the odds to be just 4 percent. “It is a very rare event for an asteroid this large to impact the moon - and it is rarer still that we know about it in advance. The impact would likely be visible from Earth, and so scientists will be very excited by the prospect of observing and analyzing it,” says ESA astrophysicist Richard Moissl.

What’s more, the impact might create a minutes-long fiery flash that earthlings could see with the naked eye, as well as a powerful lunar quake detectable by equipment on the moon. That is hardly surprising on the basis that it is currently projected that the asteroid (about as big as a 15-story building) might hit the moon at a speed of nearly 9 miles per second, which would result in a roughly 0.6-mile-wide crater about 500 feet deep.

The situation is “a rare ‘natural experiment’: a forecastable small-body impact whose signatures could be scientifically rich and operationally relevant,” Yifei Jiao, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz told Live Science.