Hi, I thought I'd share this here since it isn't being covered by any news sources. It's mostly my own research and calculations, so it could be completely wrong, but I'm fairly confident it's correct.
Most of you probably heard about the asteroid 2024 YR4, which briefly reached a 3.1% chance of Earth impact before its orbit was further constrained and the chance dropped to zero. What you may not have heard is that the chance of lunar impact has actually been steadily rising. No organization is currently reporting lunar impact statistics, so I've been calculating the probability myself. I've created a Desmos calculator that you can easily plug the approach data from NASA into. As of now it's sitting at 1.94%, with the nominal approach being less than one lunar radius from the surface of the Moon (just 0.058 sigma from the closest approach).
This is the impact corridor for the Moon, as viewed from Earth. An impact on the near side (very likely) would be visible for an entire hemisphere of the Earth, including North and Central America, the eastern half of Asia, and Australia. Map of locations where the Moon will be visible at the time of impact. I'm not sure exactly how bright an impact would be, but a 45 kg asteroid caused a flash clearly visible to telescopes during a lunar eclipse back in 2019, so I expect an asteroid about 5 million times larger would be quite the show.
A 1.94% chance is still very small, but I'll be keeping my eyes on the data and crossing my fingers for a lunar impact!
(Disclaimer, I know close to nothing about these) Am I pedantic about a useless detail or does it significantly change the probability if we consider that an object may still impact the moon after "missing it" if it comes close enough to be captured and come back after a semi orbit? Or do the relative speeds makes this extremely unlikely?
It's going far too fast to be gravitationally captured.