The Current - An asteroid may hit in 2032. How can astronomers stop it?

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

An asteroid the size of a football field is hurtling towards our planet, with a roughly 1.6 per cent chance of impact in 2032. Those may seem like good odds, but it’s prompted astronomers to issue the first ever Potential Asteroid Impact Notification. We look at what’s being done to avert catastrophe — and what researchers are learning from a different asteroid, which might contain clues about how life developed here on Earth.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current wherever you're getting this podcast. Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. There is a lot of news that's out there these days. We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some

of that news too. So if you already follow the program, thank you. And if you have done that, maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well. The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it. And on to today's show. What hit us?

Small asteroid fragments. This morning. How big were those? Those were nothing. The size of basketballs and Volkswagens. This new one you're tracking. How big? It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.

That doesn't sound good. From the 1998 election, the size of the world is now the size of the world. The size of the world is now the size of the world. The size of the world is now the size of the world. The size of the world is now the size of the world. The size of thes and Volkswagens. This new one you're tracking, how big? It's the size of Texas, Mr. President. That doesn't sound good. From the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon, in the film, a massive asteroid is barreling toward Earth. Some brave astronauts are sent into space to plant explosives and blow up said asteroid before it can destroy our planet.

It's Hollywood fantasy. But there are asteroids out there that could impact Earth and cause real damage. One of them is currently under close observation by NASA and the European Space Agency. The name of that asteroid is 2024 YR4. Scientists say it has a 1.3 to 1.6 percent chance of hitting Earth in December of 2032. Richard Moisel is head of the European Space Agency's Planetary Defense Office and he has been at the International Asteroid Warning Network meetings taking place this week in Vienna. Richard, hello. Hello, good morning, Matt. How big is this asteroid that you have

been paying close attention to? Our latest estimates are between 40 to 90 meters in diameter. Our latest estimates are between 40 to 90 meters in diameter. And so if that thing were to hit us, what kind of damage would it do? Well, first of all, there's a 99.5% approximately chance of it flying by peacefully. I appreciate you saying that. Exactly, so it's not very likely. And then if it hits Earth,

it's mostly likely to hit somewhere in the ocean. If it were to hit Earth in that size range, we would expect the likes of the 1908 Tunguska event, which flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest and sent seismic waves throughout the area and was felt and registered hundreds of kilometers away but luckily had no casualties. Another example of an asteroid in that size range with a different composition, so Tunguska is let's say if you have a loose aggregate of stony material which we call rubble pile but if you have a solid chunk of iron 50 meters across, it can create features like the Meteor or Beringer crater in Arizona,

which is about a mile across. And so, I mean- And it's a devastated area. I mentioned that you have been at these International Asteroid Warning Network meetings. What is the conversation about, if it's not this one, but another one, what we need to be thinking about

and how you start to pay attention to all of the other things that are out there in space. We do basically take constant surveillance of everything that we have. We don't only discover and monitor asteroids. We, in this case, is the planet wide planetary defense community, including every country on Earth almost.

It's not just us at the European Space Agency, but we monitor closely all the asteroids that are accessible to observations. And then in three centers worldwide, at NASA, at ESA, and Space Dice in Italy, we calculate the orbits for 100 years into the future, including all kinds of potential futures. And if you realize that an asteroid has a non-zero, and by non-zero it's any number as

small as you can imagine above zero, we call that asteroid a potential risk and then we list it publicly on our risk list. Currently we have 1,700 of these objects, but they are usually the chances one in a million or one in several thousands. So 1%, which is one in a hundred, and it's actually today at one in 62, is quite unusual. It's not a danger yet, but it's so unusual that we take a very close look at this one. In 2022, people might remember that NASA fired a rocket

into an asteroid and was able to alter its trajectory. What did you learn from that? Oh, the DART spacecraft and the event. That was a, for us, it was a historic milestone. Before, we were assuming that we understand how to influence the trajectory of an asteroid with a kinetic impact, that's what it's called when you slam a spacecraft into a space rock. But from that day on, we know that we can do it, and it was spectacular.

The effect was much more than we had predicted. I had predicted that this was about to change potentially on the order of 10 minutes, the orbital period, it was three times as much and the dust cloud was phenomenal. So it was a spectacular bang into a new age of planetary defense. A planetary defense.

I mean, that suggests that, because we're part of this community of space and so there are things that are out there that have hit planets before, have hit perhaps Earth before, that if it's not immediate, then it is inevitable at some point in time that something will hit us. That's correct. Over the centuries and millennia, you integrate up all these little probabilities and they sum up little by little until they reach one for almost any kind of size of asteroid. And this is why we are doing planetary defense efforts now and we're doing it constantly.

We're constantly developing better ways of looking at them, more efficient ways of calculating the trajectories. We learn about asteroids in the ways of science and how to counteract their impact chances and anything. So I see us in a good time. We're not under direct threat. We're not at immediate risk. This is not an alert.

This is not a crisis situation. So it's the perfect time to prepare for the day that crisis comes. Might be in a hundred years, might be in a thousand years from now. We will take that good news. Richard Meusel, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Richard Meusel heads the Planetary Defense Office at the European Space Agency. So we started with kind of a worst case scenario. There are also some very positive stories coming in about asteroids. Thanks in part to samples from one named Bennu that is still out in space. Danielle Simcas is a scientist at NASA.

She's Canadian. She's on the team examining the sample from this asteroid. She Simcas is a scientist at NASA. She's Canadian. She's on the team examining the sample from this asteroid. She's in Washington DC this morning. Danielle, good morning to you. Hi, good morning. Tell me about Bennu. So, Bennu is a pretty special asteroid. It's a rocky body, you know, floating around space that we actually kind of consider like

a time capsule from the early solar system. The chemistry of Bennu is thought to be representative of the chemistry of the, you know, very early stages of solar system formation. And we think that, well, actually we're seeing now that Bennu contains organic matter. So it contains the prebiotic organic compounds that are required to form life. You're seeing it because there was a sample

of this asteroid that was taken and brought back to Earth. That's correct. So this is NASA's first sample return mission to an asteroid. And my lab group at NASA Goddard is involved in analyzing these samples that were returned to Earth just last year. Dumb question. What does it look like? What does the sample look like? You know, it's, for me, I'm super excited to be a sampled person, but it's pretty unremarkable when you look at it, it's just very dark and dusty. It's just black.

It looks uninteresting, but once you actually obviously do the experiments, it's pretty exciting to see what's in that material. Somebody described it as surprisingly salty in terms of what is in the sample. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, that's right. So we just have been finding that it has some unusually high salts.

And that's one of the new findings from the kind of mineralogical aspect of this research. And, you know, we're just trying to understand what that means about Bennu's history and whether that has any impact on the formation of these prebiotic organic compounds that we're interested in. Why is it that people are saying, and you've hinted to this, but why are people are saying that it might

contain some of the building blocks of life? Well, you know, we, I should have said that, you know, we know that it contains the building blocks of life. When we were heading towards this asteroid, we were hoping that it did, and then, you know, the excitement last week was the release of our paper that shows that in fact it does contain these building blocks of life. They're formed by non-biological reactions in space, so just by chemical reactions, not involving life, but these molecules like amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, and nucleobases, which are the building blocks of DNA, we're finding these in the sample. We know they're not contamination and we know that they could have a role in the formation of life.

What do you hope to learn from the little bit of dust that you got from this asteroid? Well, actually there's a lot of work to be done still. I mean, we just, obviously these are exciting results just to confirm that all the work that we've been doing over the years on meteorite samples is valid. This is exciting just to confirm that and see all these organic compounds. But there's a lot of work to be done and we're finding that, Benu, depending on the sample that you're looking at, it can actually look quite different. So it's not necessarily a homogeneous asteroid and different pieces might look different. So there's just like,

there's a ton of material left to analyze. I think it's like 70% of the material is actually going to be saved for future generations, including scientists who are not even born yet. So I'm just excited to see how it differs sample to sample and if we can get some information about these chemical reactions that are involved in forming these like really important compounds. I love how giddy you are about this. I mean, you are over the moon that you have your hands on the substance in some ways.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's, it's, this is, um, I would say this is the highlight of my career so far for sure. And, um, I've been, you know, excited to work in the astrobiology analytical lab at Goddard for over a decade. It was always my ultimate goal. So I just, if I, if you told me that, you know, 10 plus years ago, if you told me that I would be working on OSIRIS-REx, I probably wouldn't have believed you. So it's just kind of exciting to actually celebrate

that we have this data. It's fantastic. Danielle, thank you very much. Thank you. Danielle Simcas is a scientist at NASA studying, as you heard, the building blocks of life that were detected on an asteroid that they took a sample from and brought back to Earth.