Last December, UH Mānoa’s asteroid early warning system discovered a jumbo jet-sized asteroid hurtling toward Earth.
“That’s big enough to take out a city, if it hits over a populated area, it takes up Honolulu, some city of that size,” said Larry Denneau, a software engineer and the co-principle investigator of Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).
Since the discovery, the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth have dropped, according to NASA calculations. Earlier this month, NASA reported a 3.1% chance of impact, but that number has dropped to .28%. If it were to make impact, it’s expected in the year 2032.
The role of ATLAS is to identify asteroids in order to warn of a potential impact. ATLAS has four telescopes: two located in Hawai’i, one in Chile, and one in South Africa. Denneau helped build the software that does the data reduction for the four telescopes and identified asteroid 2024 YR4.
Hawai’i is one of the most favorable places in the world to have a telescope, because the air is clear and the altitude of the telescopes allows for asteroids to be spotted more easily.
2024 YR4 isn’t close to being the biggest asteroid ATLAS has seen, but it is the most dangerous due to its higher probability of impact. The asteroid could cause much destruction, but you would likely know the impact location before it hits.
The ability to accurately track the landing location of an asteroid is fairly recent.
“Only in 2008 was the first asteroid ever detected in space before it hit the Earth, where they saw it, and all of the predictions that, ‘oh, this is going to hit the Earth,’ and it landed in Northern Africa somewhere,” said Denneau.
Asteroids the size of 2024 YR4 don’t make an impact often.
Barring impact to life, a chance to study the asteroid and test the technology that tracks its location would be exciting for many astronomers.
“We’re in the early part of actual planning for what it might do, and as long as it doesn’t land over where there’s people, it’d be cool to actually track it all the way,” said Denneau.
