{"id":321584,"date":"2026-03-10T01:11:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/321584\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T01:11:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:11:12","slug":"the-moon-is-safe-for-now-no-collision-in-2032-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/321584\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moon Is Safe, For Now: No Collision In 2032 After All"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first discovered, it created a bit of a kerfuffle when it was reported it had a couple-percent chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. At 60 meters (196 feet) across, this would have been in the \u201ccity killer\u201d class that nobody really wants to see make landfall, so NASA and the ESA scrambled all assets to refine its trajectory in time to do something about it. Amongst those assets was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is now reporting it will miss both us and our moon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Even with the JWST, asteroid 2024 YR4 only fills a few pixels.<\/p>\n

We reported that JWST was being tapped<\/a> for this task over a year ago, when the main concern was still if YR4 might hit Earth or not. An Earth impact was fairly quickly ruled out as the window narrowed to include only to Earth\u2019s moon, and concern shifted to excitement. A city killer striking Earth is obviously bad news. The same thing happening to the Moon is a chance to do science \u2014 and 2032 would have been plenty of time to get assets in place to observe the impact.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for the impact-curious, JWST was able to narrow down the trajectory further \u2014 and we\u2019ve now gone from up to a 4% chance of hitting Luna to a sure miss of 20,000 km or more.<\/p>\n

As this game of cosmic billiards we call a solar system continues, it\u2019s only a matter of time before Earth or her moon is struck by another object. Unless we can deflect it, that is \u2014 NASA and partnering agencies have been testing<\/a> how to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first discovered, it created a bit of a kerfuffle when it was reported…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-321584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}