NASA scientist shares list of cities that could be hit by asteroid if it strikes Earth in seven years

A NASA scientist has shared a list of cities that asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit if it impacts our planet.

Don't panic now, the odds of this chunk of space rock actually slamming into Earth are still very low despite rising in recent weeks, so the odds are still heavily in favour of the asteroid missing us completely.

Right now there's a 3.1 percent chance of the asteroid even hitting our planet, or about a one in 32 chance of that occurring.

Your outlook is going depend on whether you're a glass thirty-second-full or glass thirty-one-empty type person, but you'd need to be quite a pessimist to be thinking the worst is coming.

The chance of the asteroid hitting us is liable to change in the future, as Professor Martin Ward of Durham University said our estimations 'get more accurate with time as we get more data'.

We can see the asteroid coming, though we don't know exactly where it'll go (ATLAS)

He explained that experts project which paths the asteroid could travel along and get the chance of it hitting us from how many of those lines would strike Earth, and over time as they learn more they can knock some projected paths out of the running.

With some of those lines where the asteroid would miss us being taken out of the equation the odds of it hitting us go up slightly, but we'll get a clearer picture the closer the time when it might hit us comes.

David Rankin, an engineer at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey Project, has told Space.com that the 'risk corridor' runs through South America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent and through to Asia.

He stressed that the most likely scenario was still for the asteroid to miss us completely.

Even if it does hit it could come down in the various oceans and seas the risk corridor runs over, and any damage it would cause would really depend on just how large asteroid 2024 YR4 is.

The asteroid that probably won't hit us is a going to be at least 150 times smaller than the one which wiped out the dinosaurs (Getty Stock Image)

In the very unlikely chance that it hits planet Earth there are some cities in the projected path where the asteroid could strike.

That path goes over various cities, including the Colombian capital of Bogotá, Côte d'Ivoire city Abidjan, the Nigerian city of Lagos with 21 million people living there, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, the Indian cities of Mumbai, Kolkata and the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

Once again, the most likely occurrence is that the asteroid misses our planet completely and everyone is fine, but there are some heavily populated cities in the part of our planet where it would potentially strike.

Fortunately the asteroid is not expected to reach Earth until 2032 and we have some excellent developments in deflection technology which we could employ if the risk begins to grow too great.

Rankin has said there is even a 0.3 percent chance that the asteroid would hit the Moon instead, so that's very unlikely to happen but would make for quite a sight.