In emergency decision, James Webb telescope will study 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 before its close approach to Earth

Ngl at this point I’m rooting for the space rock
- The space rock is likely not going to hit earth. If it does it's unlikely to hit land. If it does, it's unlikely to hit major population centers.
  If it defies all odds and does that, it's going to happen in a location that is already struggling, and not in an area that's causing the suffering.

Whoever had “city killer asteroid” on their bingo card you can check it off now.

If it hits some place in Russia? Meh.

I'm team asteroid. Let it come baby.

2.3% Got my hopes up for a second there
- Hell, I got excited when I saw it was that high.
  in 2032
  FUCK.

I swear the last time I saw news about this asteroid a week or less ago it was like 1.9%
- Yes, they reassessed and found it more likely to hit.

Xcom programmers say the asteroid has a roughly 2.3% chance of impacting Earth in 2032.
So it's a sure thing!
- Can't wait to empty a SMG clip into an alien's face point blank and miss.

Things have been so wacky I think we need bingo cards for global events. We could charge for them and give bingo winners some of the proceeds.

Finally, some good news in the current media cycle

Don't Look Up
- There's a study that says the effects of an impact landing in water won't be as bad as thought.
  Also there is a way of using nukes to detonate adjacent to an asteroid or comet that slows it down without a risk of fracturing it. The heat turns the surface red hot and makes it shoot out mass and slows it down more. So we can stop basically any asteroid as long as we see it.
  
  Armageddon?
- The difference from the movie is that we should just end it already and force the asteroid to collide specifically to destroy us.
  
  What did the cats ever do?
  What about the millions of species?
  They did nothing wrong!
  
  Bro relax, America can destroy itself in Civil War 2 before the asteroid is even near. No need to wish it on the rest of earth.

The way things are going down here I'm cheering for the asteroid tbh.
- Eh calculated impact path ranges from south america through africa and india. None of these are where i want it to land.
  
  Same here but I figure the rates are going to be really cheap so I can just use up my vacation days and travel to wherever it hits.
- Even if it's at the top end of the predicted range, an impact would be ~40MT equivalent. Enough to level a city, but not an extinction event by any means; plus the likely impact path is across central America, the Atlantic, central Africa and north India - not really regions that have the resources to respond to a threat like this. Personally I'm hoping it misses, because I don't see the counties that could do something about it stepping up right now, so you'd be looking at maybe 100 million people displaced from their homes and an insurmountable humanitarian crisis
  
  It goes without saying that this is all because of
  <enter your deity name here>
  disapproval of
  <enter your hated group here>
  .
  And the flyby is a test of 'deity's' approval of our next actions. Either way we should immediately lower taxes on the rich.
  /s
  
  Personally I’m hoping it misses
  In midst of all this funnymaking, I'd like to point out for the record that anybody who genuinely wants it to hit Earth is fucking insane. Some combination of sociopath and psychopath.
  
  Most countries on Earth would treat this as a global catastrophe and put up funds regardless of where it's projected to impact.
  Maybe not the current US, though.
  
  Even if it misses, it has a chance to come back every 4 years
  
  I'm Indian and I'm OK with this hitting North India lol
  Or Pakistan
  Either is fine.
  What happens if it crashes into Sahara? Do we get glass desert?
- Came here to remark, “In hopes they can steer it at us?”
- 🤞

For those interested in how they come up with the impact probabilities and why it's really important that JWST is looking at this, Scott Manley did a great video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Esk1hg2knno
- Yeah, great video. Deflecting it seems surprisingly doable if the will is there.
  
  I like how he brought up the fact that if we try and fail, then what? What happens if NASA bumps it just enough to push it from Africa to India?

Can it direct the asteroid to mar a Lago?
- I don't believe it is a possible target given how the orbital disk of the asteroid intersects with the surface of the earth. That's of we don't change the orbit, if we decide that is necessary, we'll probably try to get a complete miss instead of just changing the impact site.
  DON'T LOOK UP
- DC, please. Move all the good museums and historical stuff first, but don't tell the administration.
- Or at the people forcing politics into every-single-discussion.
  
  politics has an ugly way of forcing itself into your life, if you don't already think about it.
  
  Well, this administration has been forcing politics into NASA by cutting funding and making all female/POC/LGBT employees unsafe/invisible. It’d be lovely if NASA was free from politics, but as we saw from Trumps last appointment of the totally unqualified Bridenstone, politics is shoving its ugly dick into science.
  
  Unfortunately in a worst case scenario this gets very political, if we do something about it in advance an impactor probe should do the job, if we decide to play the 1/50 odds and lose then the most effective short notice method is a nuke. Not a direct strike but a near detonation which vaporizes a section of the surface of the object with the outgoing plasma effectively functioning as a massive thruster. Actually doing this is not trivial but not hard either (from an engineering standpoint), the tricky part would be actually managing to launch it without every nation on earth that happens to have a beligerant leader saber rattling and stone walling the prospect of a launch until its too late even for a nuke to do any good.
  
  Ok, whatever dude.
  
  Ikr, I have a bunch of terms on my filter list but then its in the comments anyway

Oh good, an ELE. Did Elijah Wood find this one? Welp, call president Beck and send The Messiah with the nukes.
Edit: Damn two people hate Morgan Freeman that much?

An impact from such a rock wouldn't trigger a mass extinction like the much larger, dino-snuffing Chicxulub impactor did 66 million years ago. But an asteroid that size could wreak regional havoc similar to the Tunguska impactor that flattened some 80 million trees in the Siberian wilderness in 1908

Don’t look up
- But we might be able to mine it for trillions. Think of all the cell phones we could make!
  
  That's like a new model every 3 to 6 months!
- Cricket.

Spoilers: it looks like a big rock
- I got the image from James Webb early.
- On screen. Magnify.
  
  Enhance.

in 2032
Can someone tell it to hurry up already?
- It makes a close pass in 2028, around the new year. Give it a wave and say hello.

Here's my nominee to head up the "study"

Hey can this thing swing by and grab Apophis and hurry the fuck up?
- Apophis missed the keyhole, so no chance of impact this century, sorry. It would be a much bigger event, too, about 10-30 times the energy.
  But, this noise does remind me of 2004.
  
  Huh didn't think the keyhole event was til 2028 swingby. Neat. Wonder if Esa or Jacsa can get probes up in time for its next approach.

I’d be interested to see if they can capture it, rather than deflect the asteroid. We need to work on space-based manufacturing anyway, and it’d be convenient if we could get this thing parked at a Lagrange point for research and practice.

https//imgur.com/QvgHU1m

First reference to Bruce Willis.
- https://www.nasa.gov/people/nasa-astronaut-deniz-burnham/
  We don't need Bruce Willis, we have Deniz Burnham.

First reference to Bruce Willis.

What a waste
- What?
  
  It's going to be pretty easy to assess where the meteor will land once we get a few more observations, it's probably not going to hit the earth at all, Webb is capable of so much more and better things than to get caught looking for a piddly tiny rock that's caught the news cycles attention.
  There's probably larger rocks headed our way that it would observe by chance while it was doing it's actual mission.
  Taking time to reposition it to observe this spec of rock,, while there are other ways of observing that rock, is such a waste of mission time.