Amateur astronomers around the world observe the new target, noting its position in the sky the time with high precision. Since the asteroid is close to us right now, there is a lot of parallax among worldwide observations, which quickly increases precision of the calculated orbit. 2/n - ThreadSky

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elakdawalla.bsky.social • 30 days ago

Amateur astronomers around the world observe the new target, noting its position in the sky the time with high precision. Since the asteroid is close to us right now, there is a lot of parallax among worldwide observations, which quickly increases precision of the calculated orbit. 2/n

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cosmosbg.bsky.social•30 days ago

There are a lot of amateur astronomers who discover new asteroids. NASA's Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is open to everyone and every month we make new discoveries:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/fulsdavid/the-daily-minor-planet/about/research

elakdawalla.bsky.social•30 days ago

Right now, our understanding of the orbit is imprecise. The possible future paths include some, 1%, that would hit Earth in 2032. As our understanding of the orbit improves, our predictions will collapse into a much tighter area, almost certainly resulting in a prediction of no future impact. 3/n

elakdawalla.bsky.social•30 days ago

What if better observation still suggests impact is possible? Thanks to the DART mission, we now have experience in redirecting small asteroids. 7 years isn't a lot of time to work with, but 2024 YR4 is much smaller than Dimorphos. Deflecting it would be doable with no new technology. 4/n

stefanurb.bsky.social•30 days ago

It depends of composition: if it's a loose pile of stuff a DART like approach may fail, we know not enough now - safest bet might be a massive nuclear bomb, to detonate in close vicinity

elakdawalla.bsky.social•30 days ago

In the meantime, the most important thing to do would be to strengthen international ties and collaboration to make sure that we are all working together, and especially are not working at odds with each other, to mitigate the threat. That is, unfortunately, harder than rocket science. 5/5

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