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Less than two months after asteroid 2024 YR4 shot to the top of the European Space Agency’s risk list of near-Earth objects, ESA now says it “no longer poses significant impact risk” and has downgraded the threat to a Level 0 from Level 3 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale .
Scientists at one point gave the asteroid, discovered in late December, a 2.8% collision risk with Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. Since then NASA and ESA have been using various means to gather more data on its size and trajectory, in part because an object of the asteroid’s size could have led to severe damage to a local region on impact.
“Over the last few days, new observations have been used to rule out almost all of the remaining orbits that could have led to an Earth impact,” ESA said Feb. 25.
ESA said the trajectory where an asteroid’s collision risk initially rises before receding is typical.
ESA said plans to use the powerful James Webb space-based telescope to gather more information on the asteroid will proceed.
“With the deployment of new asteroid survey technologies, such as ESA’s Flyeye telescopes, we are likely to detect an increasing number of similar objects passing close to Earth that we would have missed in the past,” ESA added.
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