Why we should get used to being worried about asteroids crashing into Earth

The world wasn’t in need of another reason to panic, but asteroid 2024 YR4 gave them one anyway. It’s only really when an asteroid gets to level eight – which no asteroid has ever been anywhere near – that the scale enters the “red zone” and panic might be encouraged. “What’s changing is our ability to see them out there – and right now our capability to discover small things far away exceeds our ability to track them for a long time,” he says. That means we can discover lots of asteroids, but don’t necessarily know where they’re coming from or going, which makes it difficult to know exactly whether they might hit us or not. open image in gallery Nasa’s NEO Surveyor’s Telescope Optical Bench under construction in a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17, 2024 He acknowledges that this means that astronomers might come in for criticism.