Overview

• A team led by Professor Carrie Nugent puts the lifetime fatality risk from a >140 m asteroid at roughly 1 in 156,000 using NASA’s near-Earth object surveys and population models.
• That chance surpasses the risk of dying from rabies or being struck by lightning but is over 500 times lower than the one-in-273 odds of a fatal car crash.
• On average, asteroids of this size impact Earth once every tens of thousands of years and could cause regional devastation if they strike inhabited areas.
• Despite no recorded human deaths from asteroids, uncertainties in object counts and orbit predictions highlight the importance of continued global NEO monitoring.
• Leveraging the success of NASA’s 2022 DART mission, researchers emphasize that kinetic impactor techniques offer feasible mitigation against the rare but high-consequence threat.