PREVIEW

Paranal Panic: How A Green Energy Project Could Stop Us Seeing The Next 'Armageddon' Asteroid. In February this year the world was left on tenterhooks after astronomers discovered a large asteroid with a significant chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. Thankfully, the possibility of real-life scenes resembling the movie Armageddon quickly passed - but next time we may not be so lucky. That's because the telescope that the world's top space scientists used to track the asteroid, 2024 YR4, is under threat. Sitting atop the Paranal mountain in Chile's Atacama desert, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) is perfectly situated to stare into the cosmos. However, all that is now under threat from INNA - a massive industrial-scale green hydrogen project. Situated just 11km from the VLT at its closest point, INNA is planned to cover an area the size of a small city. Scientists fear that not only will it harm one of their best spots for studying the skies, but it could mean we miss the chance to track the next threat coming from space. That's because we only have a small window to track asteroids and judge their likelihood of impact before they become invisible from Earth. ESO Astronomer Olivier Hainaut warns: “With that brighter sky, the VLT would lose the faint 2024 YR4 about one month earlier which would make a huge difference in our capability to predict an impact, and prepare mitigation measures to protect Earth.” In the case of 2024 YR4, Hainaut says that we were luckily able to rule out the possibility of a collision fairly swiftly but next time it could be different, and a threatening asteroid could drop out of the sight of a VLT whose capabilities are damaged by light pollution.