A 3% chance an asteroid will hit us? I don’t like those odds

In 1979, there was a movie called Meteor, about a nearly five-mile-wide piece of the asteroid Orpheus that was heading toward Earth.

If it hit, it would cause an incredible catastrophe which would probably extinguish mankind.

To stop the meteor, NASA wanted to use the illegal nuclear weapon satellite Hercules, but soon discovered that it didn’t have enough firepower.

Their only chance to save the world was to forces with the USSR, which had also launched its own illegal satellite. But would both governments agree?

They did, of course, agree in the end and the asteroid was blown to pieces in a t operation and the world was saved. Phew!

That was science fiction, but if we were to face a real challenge like that today, you’d have to wonder how we’d fare out.

If Europe was in the firing line, how much would we get from Russia? Or the USA for that matter, given the current state of uncertainty which Donald Trump has created.

Thankfully, that scenario is very unlikely to play out in real life. Or is it?

Scientists who watch out for this kind of stuff are closely monitoring 2024 YR4, which is the name of an asteroid with an estimated diameter of somewhere between 130 to 300ft.

Scientists reckon this piece of rock will Earth around December, 2032, and they estimate that the probability of it hitting us is about 3.1%.

Now, some people might relax with those odds, but not me. Back in 2018 I had a biopsy on my prostate. Not the most pleasant experience I ever had, and I was told at the time there shouldn’t be any complications. Only 3% of patients get an infection, they told me, so I shouldn’t worry.

Well, guess what? I was part of the 3%.

So, I’m beginning my search for a suitable site to build my bunker because, with my luck, 2024 YR4 is heading straight for my kitchen. And even if it misses me, there’s plenty of other stuff that could come through my roof.

It’s not only asteroids or meteorites we have to worry about. Apparently, there’s a huge amount of junk floating about in space. NASA estimates there’s more than 6,000 tonnes of the stuff in orbit at the moment, and some of that occasionally comes crashing down to Earth.

Villagers in Kenya got a surprise visit a few months ago when a piece of it fell from the sky and landed with a thump on farmland near a dry riverbed. Locals told the BBC that it sounded like a gunshot while others thought it sounded like a car crash.

It was in fact a giant metal ring and it was piping hot. The villagers had to wait for it to cool down before they could even approach it.

The Kenya Space Agency (KSA) soon got involved and made arrangements to investigate the following day.

They determined that it weighed more than 500kg (1,102lb), around the same as an adult horse, and was around 2.5m (8ft) in diameter, roughly the size of a child’s four-seater merry-go-round.

The KSA said its preliminary assessments indicated the object was “a separation ring” from a space launch rocket.

These things are usually designed to either burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or fall onto unoccupied areas, such as the oceans. This one didn’t and, as the space industry grows, it is predicted that such incidents will become more frequent.

Experts tell us that the chances of being struck by space junk are about one in 10,000, but try telling that to the unlucky homeowner in Naples, Florida, who was surprised when an object crashed through the roof and two floors of his home.

NASA stated that the object was space debris, a 1.6-pound piece of a bigger 5,800-pound pallet containing old batteries that the agency released from the International Space Station three years previously. The pallet was supposed to burn up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, but a small piece survived and impacted the Florida home.

But, according to National Geographic, other pieces, like old rocket segments jettisoned in orbit and abandoned spacecraft, regularly fall toward Earth unguided too.

A hiker in northern Colorado came across a spherical object, still warm to the touch, sitting in a crater. NASA officials later told him it was a fuel tank from a Russian Zenit-3 rocket launched previously and is one of the few foreign space objects to be recovered in the United States.

A woman taking a late-night walk in Oklahoma in January, 1997, saw a streak of light in the sky, then felt something brush her shoulder. It turned out to be part of a U.S. Delta II rocket launched in 1996, the only space debris known to have hit someone, according to the Aerospace Corporation.

The woman was unhurt and lucky. A 580-pound (260-kilogram) fuel tank from the same rocket slammed to the ground in Texas around the same time, narrowly missing an occupied farmhouse.

In January, 1978, the Soviet surveillance satellite Kosmos 954 crashed in northern Canada, scattering radioactive material from the spacecraft’s nuclear power generator over thousands of square miles.

A frantic campaign dubbed Operation Morning Light was mounted to find the radioactive material, but only 0.1 percent of the dangerous debris was ever recovered.

When the Salyut-7 space station went out of control, Soviet engineers tried to send it into a controlled tumble into the Atlantic Ocean. But their efforts failed, and the 88,000-pound (39,916-kilogram) station, one of the largest man-made objects to re-enter the atmosphere, showered metal fragments on a city in Argentina. No-one was hurt.

Seems to me there’s a greater chance of being hit by a piece of space junk than our 2024 YR4 asteroid, but I’m still going to forge ahead with plans for my bunker.