At the AAAS conference in Phoenix, NASA planetary defense officials warned that only about 40% of mid-sized near‑Earth asteroids have been found and no deflection spacecraft is ready to launch, according to a report. The agency said tens of thousands of such asteroids remain untracked and could cause regional damage.
(Ed. note: Only about 40% of mid-sized near‑Earth asteroids have been detected so far.) This detection gap drives the concern that threats may appear with little warning.
Dr. Kelly Fast emphasized the unknowns and the risk posed by intermediate-sized rocks, noting “It’s really the asteroids that we don’t know about.” She warned these objects could cause regional devastation even if they do not trigger global effects.
Teams tracked asteroid 2024 YR4 through early 2025 after briefly assigning it a 3.2% impact chance for 2032. Further data reduced that risk to one in 26,000, giving a 99.9961% probability Earth will avoid an impact.
Dr. Nancy Chabot cited the DART mission but warned the program has no spare intercept craft ready, saying “Dart was a great demonstration. But we don’t have [another] sitting around ready to go if there was a threat that we needed to use it for.”
Markets may respond when credible threats arise, and analysts are watching insurer names such as Travelers (TRV), Chubb (CB), and Kinsale Capital (KNSL) for potential repricing. NASA officials also stressed investment in planetary defense, calling it “the only natural disaster we could potentially prevent.”
