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Asteroid 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon

Asteroid 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon

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Space Safety

05/03/2026
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Last year, an approximately 60 metre near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moon on 22 December 2032.

Now, that risk has been eliminated. Astronomers have confirmed that 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon using new observations made by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Instead, it will safely pass the Moon at a distance of more than 20 000 km.

As asteroid 2024 YR4 raced away from Earth and faded from view last spring, it was widely assumed that it would not be visible again until 2028. But an international team of astronomers identified two narrow opportunities in February 2026 in which they believed that Webb may be able to detect the faint speck against a sparse backdrop of stars whose positions are very well known thanks to the work of ESA’s Gaia mission.

The challenge was significant: to use one of the most complex machines humankind has ever built to track an almost invisible object many millions of kilometres away – and then accurately predict its position almost seven years into the future.

Webb was designed to study galaxies and other vast cosmic structures billions of light-years away. The telescope’s field of view is very small, and detecting one of the faintest asteroids ever targeted within it required extraordinary precision.

Careful planning and analysis of the observations were coordinated through a close collaboration between ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, and the Webb mission.

Despite the challenges, the observations were a success. By comparing 2024 YR4’s position relative to the background stars, the team was able to measure its orbit accurately enough to rule out a lunar impact in 2032.

Decades of engineering, international cooperation, and innovation in the fields of science, engineering and planetary defence culminated in the use of humankind’s most powerful robotic space telescope, built by many nations, to spot a distant speck of dust across the void and answer a question of universal importance to all the inhabitants of our planet.

The Moon is safe, 2024 YR4 poses no danger, but the work continues. The Planetary Defence team in ESA’s Space Safety Programme continues to detect and track near-Earth objects to ensure that if a genuine danger ever emerges, we will not be caught unaware.

Find out more about these activities at the links below.

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