This More or Less podcast episode interviews Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about asteroid 2024 YR4 and the initial, inflated concerns regarding its potential impact on Earth. The interview details how initial calculations suggested a 3% chance of impact, causing widespread alarm, but further observation reduced this probability to an extremely low 5 in 10 million. Farnocchia explains that the initial high probability stemmed from uncertainties in the asteroid's trajectory, which decreased with more data. The podcast highlights the importance of continuous asteroid tracking and reassures listeners that large, city-destroying asteroid impacts are highly improbable. The episode concludes by emphasizing that while asteroid impacts are a part of the solar system's evolution, they are not something to lose sleep over.
