Reply To: Asteroid 2024 YR4 – Close approach in 2032 – Risk of Earth impact

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Nick James
Participant

This interesting paper has jus been posted on Archiv:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11217

The authors consider the potential effect of a lunar impact of 2024 YR4 on 2032 December 22. They conclude that it could temporarily increase the flux of mm sized meteoroids in near-Earth space by several orders of magnitude. This could be bad news for spacecraft in low-earth orbit but might give us a nice meteor shower.

The probability of a lunar impact is currently around 4% and the high end of their flux predictions require some relatively unlikely alignments to happen but it is definitely an interesting read.