Scientist warns it might be too late to deflect city-killer asteroid heading toward Earth

What a rock-block.An award-winning UK scientist warns that it might be too late to deflect the “city killer” asteroid that’s headed toward Earth.Deflection efforts “might not be able to stop 2024 YR4,” cautioned Dr.Robin George Andrews, a London-based volcanologist and author, in a chilling X post blowing up online.Discovered hurtling through our galaxy in December 2024, the building-sized space rock is reportedly at the top of NASA’s watch list when it comes to deep space dangers, boasting a 1-in-43 chance of striking Earth in 2023.And while the odds of armageddon might seem slim, Dr.

Andrews believes that we’re in big trouble if the intergalactic gravel is indeed on a collision course with our planet.The scientist threw cold water on the defense potential of the DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft, which was successfully used to knock the 580-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos off course in 2022.This cosmic kamikaze mission reportedly shortened its orbit by more than half-an-hour, potentially paving the way for humans to alter the trajectory of other dangerous cosmic bodies.While Andrews acknowledged that this celestial crash test “worked wonders,” he warned that this doesn’t mean we can “deflect any asteroid whenever we want.”“So much could go wrong if we try and hit it with something like DART,” said the researcher.He noted that many asteroids are loose rubble piles of sand, dirt and boulders tethered tenuously together by gravity.When hit, they could fragment and potentially send this interstellar shrapnel hurtling toward Earth — a phenomenon Andrews analogized to “turning a cannonball into a shotgun spray.”Even if the strike was successful, there might not be enough time to significantly alter the asteroid’s path, warned the scientist.

He noted that YR4 is arriving in just 8 years while it takes “10 years or more to build, plan and execute an asteroid deflection mission.”“This is because the deflection a...