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I'm Professor Noel Fitzpatrick and as a vet, I know you want the best care for your animal companion. Pet insurance can help, but you need to choose wisely as not all policies are the same. Pet plan aimed to pay claims quickly and without a fuss. And that's one reason why so many vets work with them. Get your pet the best veterinary care. Save 10% on new policies when you insure at petplan.co.uk. Teasing fees apply, fits all need as an appointed representative of Pet Plan Limited. Hello and welcome to an emergency bonus episode of the supermassive podcast, Nobody Panic. Yeah, with me science journalist Izzy Clark, producer Richard Hollingham and resident expert Dr Robert Massey, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society. Do you want more of the alarm? Yes, I do, obviously. So Becky's away in the sunshine at the moment. And this podcast was inspired by a message from Marcus on email, which simply reads asteroid 2024, why are for emergency pod followed by emojis of an asteroid? I mean, I sort of opened that quite late at night. I was like, I think this needs to happen. So asteroid 2024, why are for is an asteroid with the potential to hit earth? It's astronomy news that everyone is talking about. So, Robert, what do we know about this asteroid? Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is that it's it's one of many, right? You know, and there are an awful lot like this that cross or come close to the orbit of the earth and thereby the earth as well. But this particular one is it takes about four years to go around the sun. It's similar in size. This is where you can probably get your panic button going, but I'm going to try and cut things down similar in size to the object that caused the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908 that flattened a bit of a Siberian forest and meet your crater in Arizona, which is obviously, you know, on the tourist trail in a big way, roughly a mass of maybe 200,000 tons, 40 to 90 meters across. And we think it's stony rather than iron dominated. That's just based on the light that's been analyzed from it so far. The uncertainties are just because it's too small to resolve. It's not big. It's sort of, you know, imagine could be as small as a bus, could be a lot bigger. And but in a telescope, it just looks like a dot. So you have to estimate its size and looking at its brightness and trying to deduce it from that. That's, you know, but that's what we know about it so far. It might be, you know, we don't know, for example, whether it's sort of a so-called rubble pile of stuff glued together by gravity, stuck together by gravity, or whether it's more solid. We just don't have that information yet. Yeah. OK. And so how was it discovered? It's an example. It's a great example, actually, of an object being found by a robotic telescope system. This one has the name Atlas, which stands for Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System. And that spotted it on the 27th of December last year. And the network that make up Atlas is the little fairly small telescopes, actually, 50 centimetre mirrors. They're robotic, so they're remote controlled, and they just deal with these things, you know, scanning the sky quite frequently, which is what you want if you're trying to spot asteroids, because they could be anywhere in the sky, but, you know, you need to do that survey. And they're based in Chile, South Africa and Hawaii. So there's this network. The reason for that is that when you get to cover the whole sky and, you know, depending on whether you're seeing it the time of day, whether it's day or night, where you are. And it's specifically designed to look for objects like this. And you might remember as well that whenever we, not whenever, but quite often now, when we're highlighting comets, you might be able to see with your eye. A lot of them now have Atlas in their name because the way comets are named is they include the telescope to discover it. So Atlas is doing a great job. Yeah. And so let's get into this. So what is the likelihood of it hitting us? Because I think the media have perhaps got a little bit excited about this. So let's just talk about the facts. And you're the voice of reason, aren't you? I should say, Robert, you've been you've been portrayed in the popular press as the voice of reason on this. So the voice of reason, or there's less flattering descriptions that I'll mention, but yeah. So the likelihood at this point, based on the uncertainty ellipse, you have to imagine you're tracking this thing and running it forward to 2032, which is when it's predicted to come very close to the earth. There's a big uncertainty about exactly where it will be. Too many kilometers wide. Within that, there'll be a distribution, you know, there'll be a peak in the center. And based on that, there is a one in 43 or 2.3 percent chance that it hits the earth. It might also, by the way, hit the moon instead, because that's within the uncertainty ellipse as well. But the thing to bear in mind is that this is not unusual. When you find an object like this and you're projecting what it will do many years in the future, even even seven years in the future, you're going to have a degree of uncertainty. If it's coming reasonably close to the earth, part of that includes that it will it will strike the earth. So what will likely happen is that as we get more observations, as we track it, we're able to refine the orbit and that probability will drop to zero because we'll realize that it isn't actually going to hit the earth. It's going to go close to it, which is really not that unusual at all. And events like this are quite common. They happen as I designed this multiple times a year that we find smaller rocks, probably smaller than this that come near the earth. And there's uncertainty, the outset as to how close they'll come, whether they'll hit or not. But as we refine it, it's all bit. I'm pretty confident that will drop to zero. Obviously, you can't rule the possibility out entirely. But, you know, there's no reason for alarm at this point. Could it go up? I mean, 2.3 percent. You know, it sounds low or it sounds really high because it's one of these things that would have an enormous impact if it hit the earth. Exactly. It's an example of a low probability, high impact, you know, in every sense scenario. So if it hit the earth, sure, it's like a large nuclear weapon detonating on a point on the earth's surface. Would it be a global catastrophe? No. But obviously, it would be bad news if it hits a populated area, you know, or even just we don't want it to hit the earth bluntly. You know, we don't want it to flatten the inhabited forest even. That's not great news. So you're right in saying to that the probability could go up as the orbits refined, but given it's so low at this point, you know, my hunch is it's going to be going down because that's what they've all tended to do in the past. We also, of course, have seven years to be thinking about what to do about this. You know, maybe we need to be starting to think very hard now, but there are plans in place. And the next stage is going to be to track it to follow its orbit, to make sure that we get a more refined orbital path for the next few years. And that's that's the work that has to be done. And so what is that plan over the next few years? How do scientists track something like this and how do they make plans to keep an eye on it and perhaps need to react if, you know? Yeah, the answer is you need to have the telescope time. You need to be pointing telescopes at this object, 2024 YR4 to refine its orbit. Now, the difficulty is that asteroids shine by a reflected sunlight and they're not that big, they're quite small objects really, despite what we're describing. And they're with planets and moons and so on. So they're faint and they're hard to detect. And obviously the further they are away from the earth, the fainter they are. And that makes them harder still to find. So one of the plans in this particular case is to use the James Web Space Telescope, that's got a six and a half meter mirror. It's much more sensitive. It'll be operating in infrared, but that works well. And it's being deployed to look at the asteroid in March, April and May. So they are already putting plans in place, I guess, to refine its orbit and also to get more of an understanding of what it's made of and how big it is. Because that's important, too, if we do want to, you know, in the unlikely event it was actually going to hit the earth, it's useful to know that stuff. Yeah. And even if this one doesn't come close to earth, will we inevitably get hit at some point in the future? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's cheery stuff. I mean, we absolutely will in the sense that in the long run, there's enough rubble in the solar system, there are enough asteroids, there are long period commons and all of these things that sometimes come close to the earth rarely come close to the earth. So if we don't make an effort to track all of them, all the so-called potentially hazardous asteroids and put those mitigation plans in place, yeah, then sure, at some point an object will hit the earth. It's happened many times in the past. It's going to happen again. But the good news as well on this is not only are we good at tracking them now. And I do think, by the way, we need to do more of that. But not only are we good at that, we've actually already deflected an asteroid because the dark mission, the double asteroid rendezvous mission in 2022, hit an asteroid called Didymos, reduces its orbital period by three minutes, which doesn't sound a lot, but it adds up over time. And that's the sort of thing you need to do to divert it away from the earth. You know, so that it either passes the earth's orbit slightly before or slightly after the earth has been there. That one is worth it's worth reflecting on the fact that was actually a lot bigger. That Didymos was a lot bigger than 2024 YR4. So we know we can nudge things at this side. So my suggestion would be that we need to make sure we've got a mission like that is available quite soon. We've done it before. Let's make sure some others are ready to go. Just in case I am tentatively confident that humanity can respond to this challenge, we'll see. And overall, I'm not too worried about it. I'm not losing sleep over it being quoted like that. What can you do? And I have been also, who knows, of that some fair being quoted to be like Michael Fish, who was for people aren't in the UK in a certain age. He was a British weather forecaster who famously reassured people. Hurricane wasn't on the way just before the great storm of 1987. Now, he was technically right. It wasn't a hurricane, but the forecast was actually slightly wrong because it was the centre of the storm as forecast to go over the channel. As it was, it was a bit further north. So, you know, people were understandably ribbing him forever. And it was a similar setup to this in a way that they had a letter from a viewer saying, is there going to be a hurricane? And he said, no, absolutely, there's not going to be a hurricane. It's a very similar setup, Robert. I don't want to put you in it. I know, I know, I'm putting my neck in the light. I mean, look, you know, I could be absolutely could be wrong. But all we can say at this point is we know what the stats are telling us. We know what the probability is. I don't think there's any cause to alarm. And it's not the first time we've had asteroids with a small chance of hitting the earth and we also have enough time to do something about this. I think it's reasonable for space agencies, particularly to be concerned and for astronomers to be on the case. But there's absolutely no reason to panic, you know, chances are, first of all, this will go away. If we did nothing, chances are it would be fine. But it would be prudent to have something like a dark time mission ready just in case. Well, that's what I was going to ask, because just out of curiosity, how quickly can something like a dark mission be activated and be like, actually, no, come on, everyone, off we go to this approaching asteroid. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, if you just want to divert it, you need to lump in that case. I think the dark mission had a mass of about 600 kilograms. So that's not ridiculous to launch into space. It was done before as long as we have the launch vehicles and a coherent mass. I don't, you know, yes, of course, it requires funding and scientists and engineers to work on it, et cetera, et cetera. I don't see why it would be as hard to put together, say, a proper science mission with all the kind of instrumentation stuff that goes with that and all the science cases and argument. If you just want to deflect the thing, throwing a lump, 600 kilograms at it, surely we can manage that if we've got rockets capable of launching these things, which we absolutely have. So I would hope that would almost be something that could be put together in months. But, you know, I don't work for a space agency, so they would probably come in and tell me how that's completely outrageous. This proves the whole benefits of space exploration, though, doesn't it? And doing what astronomers do. Yeah, I mean, you know, planetary defence is. If you like, it's almost it's just one part of astronomy, right? And space exploration, but it's a really important part. And so, you know, I'm going to cynically say that's one of the reasons you should be funding astronomy and space science. We need to do these things. We do need to understand not just the big questions about our past, our future, about life elsewhere in the universe, but also very practical things like this, defending ourselves against asteroid impacts, long period comets, perhaps space weather events. There are things, there are examples where the wider universe actually does have a real impact on our lives on Earth. And it's important to be aware of those and doing something about it. Amazing. Thanks, Robert. And we'll have more on asteroids in our next main episode on sample return missions in a few weeks. Marvelous. Thank you. In fact, I almost said that I will never forget that I went to university with a guy who, at the end of our masters, had the option of was thinking about becoming a space attorney or an accountant. And he became an accountant. And so whenever I see anything like planetary defence, I'm like, you could have done that. So the reason I'm here, not just for the incisive interview questions. Yeah. Was just want to thank everyone who's interested in a paid ad free version of the podcast. We have listened and we will do that. Yes, it is happening. And thank you to everyone who seemed quite concerned that I didn't know what I was doing. It's OK. We're going to be setting that up on Patreon and details will follow very soon. We are. We've been doing that all afternoon, trying to set this up. And the podcast still exists. So nothing's been set on fire, so we're OK. Yet. So thank you for listening to this emergency bonus episode of the Supermassive Podcast. We will be back in a few weeks time. And Becky, we'll be back. You'll be pleased to hear. I'm Professor Norlfords Patrick. And as a vet, I know you want the best care for your animal companion. Pet insurance can help, but you need to choose wisely, as not all policies are the same. Pet plan aimed to pay claims quickly and without a fuss. And that's one reason why so many vets work with them. Get your pet the best veterinary care. Save 10% on new policies when you ensure at petplan.co.uk. Ties and C's apply fits all need as an appointed representative of Pet Plan Limited. Chase is the digital bank that gives your savings a boost anytime, anywhere. 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