India, Feb. 12 -- The odds of a 'city-killer' asteroid estimated to be the same size as New York's Statue of Liberty or London's Big Ben hitting the Earth recently went up, per astronomers' prediction. The space rock, labelled 2024 YR4 that previously had a 1.2% chance of colliding with our home planet on December 22, 2032, now has a one-in-43 (2.3%) probability of turning an apocalyptic sci-fi scenario into a reality.

As a result, the world's space agencies are acting accordingly. Ever since the Sentry list kept by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory updated 2024 YRF's chance of hitting Earth, an international team of scientists has been allowed to use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to mea...