An asteroid could hit Earth in 2032. Here's why experts say do not panic.

Astronomers around the world have trained their telescopes toward an asteroid they believe has a minimal, but not insignificant, chance of hitting Earth in just under 8 years.

Though space agencies say the public should not worry about Asteroid 2024 YR4, its size and impact probability were unusual enough to trigger for the first time an international warning system established in 2013. Now, astronomers will use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most complex ever developed, to better understand the asteroid and its trajectory.

Here’s what to know.

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The facts

-- Asteroid 2024 YR4 is orbiting near Earth’s region of the solar system, and preliminary estimates by space agencies give it a roughly 2 percent chance of hitting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.

-- Astronomers are particularly interested in this asteroid because, if it were to hit Earth, it “is large enough to cause localized damage,” according to NASA.

-- Astronomers are continuing to track and refine their calculations about the asteroid’s orbit, and their assessment of its impact probability is in flux. So far, that probability has gone up. But astronomers say it will very likely drop to zero as they refine their forecasts.

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What to know about Asteroid 2024 YR4

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Asteroid 2024 YR4 is estimated to be between 40 and 90 meters wide - at its largest, big enough to approximately cover a football field from goal line to goal line.

As of Jan. 31, 2025, it was located about 30 million miles from Earth, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

It was first reported on Jan. 27, 2025, after it came closer to Earth on Christmas and was spotted by a telescope in Chile that is part of a NASA-funded initiative.

Astronomers say it will fade from the view of Earth-based telescopes by mid-April as it moves away from Earth to orbit around the sun, and that it will become observable again only in mid-2028. They are gathering as much information as they can about it in the meantime.

“The most likely outcome is that with all the data we catch, we will be able to demonstrate and prove that there is no impact risk, that it will go to zero,” said Richard Moissl, head of the planetary defense office at the European Space Agency. “However, especially if it’s a very close approach to Earth, we might not go below 1 percent” before the asteroid moves too far away, he said, adding that this “doesn’t mean anything dangerous.”

“Then we have to wait until mid-2028 to make certain” it poses no threat, he said.

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The asteroid doesn’t pose an existential risk but it could cause severe damage

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Asteroid 2024 YR4 does not pose an existential risk to civilization - it’s not nearly big enough. But it would deliver a significant punch if it struck Earth. In that unlikely event, according to CNEOS, it would impact at a speed of about 38,000 miles per hour.

According to the European Space Agency, “an asteroid this size impacts Earth on average every few thousand years and could cause severe damage to a local region.”

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is of a scale to severely damage a city or other population center, said Moissl. But even taking into account the low risk of it hitting Earth, if it did hit Earth, it would be much more likely to impact the ocean than a city, he said. “And in the deep ocean, an impact would have no severe consequences either.”

Astronomers believe that if it did hit Earth, the impact location would be somewhere along a corridor spanning “the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia,” CNEOS said. According to a memo from the International Asteroid Warning Network, the blast damage could reach as far as about 30 miles from the impact site.

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It has the full attention of astronomers and governments

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Though astronomers say Asteroid 2024 YR4 is highly unlikely to hit Earth, “the situation is significant enough to warrant the attention of the global planetary defense community,” the ESA’s Planetary Defense Office said Monday in a blog post.

As a precaution, any object with more than a 1 percent probability of impacting Earth is flagged to other nations’ space agencies and to the United Nations.

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Astronomers believe asteroids can be moved off course

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In 2022, NASA said it successfully collided a spacecraft into an asteroid, changing its motion through space significantly and offering promise that this still-experimental technique could someday be applied as a practical form of planetary defense.

This technique is known as a kinetic impactor, and Moissl said it would be the most likely recourse in the unlikely event that the asteroid’s impact probability increased substantially and it were headed toward Earth. “If it came to the point where we need to consider space-based missions in order to deflect the asteroid, the so-called kinetic impactor is the so far only proven method,” he said, though he added astronomers were exploring several other options.

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Better technology may lead to more frequent asteroid discoveries

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The appearance of Asteroid 2024 YR4 has exposed a sticky situation for astronomers. Telescopes and cameras are getting much better at finding the objects roaming the solar system. As a result, this kind of warning is likely to become more common.

That will put pressure on scientists to communicate the level of risk clearly to authorities and the public, so they understand that the discovery of a potentially hazardous asteroid is the result of an improved detection system and not a harbinger of doom.

And while the risk of Asteroid 2024 YR4 actually hitting Earth is very low, that doesn’t mean astronomers should be complacent.

“Anything this size, when it has any percentage possibility of hitting the Earth, it’s a wake-up to get more observations and more modeling and pay attention to it,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist for The Planetary Society, a space science advocacy group, previously told The Washington Post.