The UN officer was trained for this moment. He was training and practicing on the tables in his offices in Vienna, sitting in a gray and unassuming 1970s concrete building near the Danube River.
Aarti Holla-Maini, a British lawyer with a background in the satellite business, needed to at least play the situation step by step. As the head of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), he was required to know exactly what he was expected to do if – and it was a big if – he was informed that a very large asteroid was on a possible collision course with Earth. Or, as he said with a laugh: “Armageddon.”
If that happens, Holla-Maini is the designated person who will alert the UN secretary general immediately. They will now take his message to 193 member states – almost every government in the world.
Sounding the alarm over an asteroid threat is not a normal part of the job. But more than a year ago, Holla-Maini found herself doing just that. In between trips, he was pulled aside by an office colleague. Holla-Maini recalls: “This was not a joke or a joke. It was real.
On December 27, 2024, a robotic telescope in Chile spotted a distant rock crashing through space, initially estimated to be the size of a small building. This in itself is not an unusual occurrence, and scientists typically follow the asteroid to reassess and update its Earth impact probability (IP). It’s also not a secret, and news of the asteroid was spreading across the world before Holla-Maini got involved.
However at this point, the asteroid, not named 2024 YR4, was seen as a growing threat. Its IP increased steadily over the next three weeks, as more sites began tracking it and more statistics were created. An initial estimate of a less than 0.05% chance of it hitting Earth has grown to more than a 1% chance of impact by 2032.
That, together with its size, meant that 2024 YR4 met the criteria for Unoosa to give its first global notification since the United Nations created a planetary defense partnership in 2013. Although the probability was small – in fact a 99% chance of not hitting – it was considered important because the size of the asteroid and the speed would mean a strong impact of the energy of the the hundredth world to release Hiroom’s world power. It could destroy a city, or even a region.
By then in late January 2025, Romana Kofler, a program officer, was too late. To Unoosa, he is the point of contact for planetary defense (an asteroid in the asteroid belt is named after him). Kofler had been in discussions with the International Asteroid Warning Network, a group of astronomers supported by the UN, members of NASA and European countries, Esa, as well as experts who read the paths and tracks of distant rocks.
“We practiced this with simulations, but this was the real thing,” says Kofler. “The adrenaline kicked in.”
After he tapped Holla-Maini on the shoulder to make the announcement, they wrote the letter and sent it to António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations. Holla-Maini says: “We were very quick to prepare those articles.” So this was the first real test of the international response.”
Real world threats
The threat posed by objects in outer space is far from theoretical. In 2013, a spaceship exploded in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The event, caused by a rock 20 meters (60ft) in diameter, released the equivalent of 500 kilotons of TNT, creating a shockwave that shattered windows in thousands of apartments. More than 1,200 people were injured by flying glass and debris. The fireball was 30 times brighter than the sun, causing immediate skin burns and proving that even small space rocks can cause serious injury without warning.
For a brief period last year, 2024 YR4 was the most significant near-term threat since the discovery of Apophis in 2004, which made headlines after it was rated four on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, but was later downgraded when comments showed it would not pose a threat for at least a century. The Torino scale goes from zero, when there is no risk, to 10, when there is a collision and poses a threat to the future of civilization as we know it.
At that rate, 2024 YR4 reached the third level, and its discovery activated another organization supported by the United Nations, the Advisory Group on Space Planning, tasked with dealing with ways to save the Earth. Another option is to deflect an asteroid by smashing it with an interceptor spacecraft, a technique successfully tested on another asteroid in Nasa’s 2022 Dart mission.
Unoosa’s daily reality is not always about disaster. Called “Younoosa”, it is not a well-known UN organization. It’s also not very big: 35 employees work in the modest Vienna International Center, far from the exciting UN hubs in Geneva and New York.
It was founded in the twilight of the 1950s, at the beginning of the age of space, when the United Nations, itself still having a baby, decided to create a body with “desire”, as it says, to avoid the expansion of political competitions on Earth in space. Today the small office space controls a lot of money, as governments and businesses increasingly seek to operate in space.
Having moved from 25 years in the business sector to the busy and organized UN, Holla-Maini spends much of her time traveling the world to conferences and has many responsibilities, including promoting international law and order in an increasingly crowded and competitive environment.
The agency runs a program called Space for All, to help non-spacefaring nations reap the benefits of orbit. Its disaster and emergency response program, UN-Spider, facilitates access to satellite images for countries facing natural disasters.
But it is Unoosa’s role as the official registry of satellites launched into Earth orbit that has become most important. As the number of satellites rises above 10,000, and many times that number is planned for launch, the near-Earth space becomes a crowded and dangerous area of traffic.
The agency has found itself acting as an informal “hotline” for potential satellite conflicts – a role that becomes alarmingly complex when the satellites involved belong to countries with no diplomatic ties.
Holla-Maini recounts an incident last June when the Malaysian Space Agency called Unoosa over the weekend after one of its satellites, which was inoperable, appeared to be on a collision course with a North Korean satellite. They were only 75 meters apart, says Holla-Maini – it was a “very hot” situation.
Since there was no official two-way line to Pyongyang, Holla-Maini’s team had to send all the information to North Korean email addresses that they knew would not respond. Holla-Maini says: “The best thing you can do is send any information and information you can to every official point you can contact. And then, without a response, the North Korean satellite suddenly moved. “They went off course without us having a two-way communication.”
Whether it’s a star alarm that can destroy a city, help during a flood disaster in Morocco or prevent a world collision, Vienna’s “small team” punches above its weight, says Holla-Maini. “Because we’ve had this problem of staff inequality, not having enough budget, it has forced the office to work very well,” he adds.
The 2024 YR4 asteroid scare served as an important test for Unoosa’s new role in planetary defense. Currently, the asteroid is being monitored. Although the probability of a strike in the world rose to more than 3% in February last year, it has since declined to a negligible level.
Holla-Maini says: “Suddenly it ended.”
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