Good news: The asteroid 2024 YR4 will not hit Earth in 2032.

Bad news: There’s a small chance it hits the moon.

Researchers later this month, and again in May, are planning to use the James Webb Space Telescope to get more accurate readings on Asteroid 2024 YR4. Webb is operated out of the Space Science Telescope Institute, based in Baltimore.

While Earth is in the clear this time, researchers say studying YR4 will help them test and improve planetary defense systems.

When it was first discovered, YR4 had a small chance of hitting Earth — and then, for a time, scientists thought it had as high as a 3% chance of hitting us.

NASA has since given the all-clear for Earth and said there’s a just-under 2% chance it hits the moon.

YR4 is not large enough to be a world-ender if it had hit Earth, with NASA saying that, depending on its exact measurements, it could , at worst, have led to “collapsing residential structures across a city and shattering windows across larger regions.”

Bleak, but not terrible, when you consider what happened to the dinosaurs.

However, researchers say this asteroid is a great test case for planetary defense systems.

“One of the thing’s that’s really interesting is essentially, we got to test out the process of exactly what you would do in this scenario [of a potential impact],” said Cristina Thomas, an associate professor in the astronomy and planetary science department at Northern Arizona University.

Thomas is one of the researchers working on the project to measure YR4 with Webb. She said combined datasets from the powerful cameras on Webb will allow the team to get a better sense of the asteroid’s size and position in space.

That measure of where it is in space, called astrometry, also goes into calculating the asteroid’s orbit, which helps scientists get a better idea of how likely it is to collide with Earth or the moon.

Thomas said she thinks the measurements from Webb “could give moon the all-clear.”

The lead investigator on the research project called YR4 a good “first alert for the system.”

“While we still need to measure the size of YR4, we already know it’s small enough not to have global or even regional effects if it were to have hit Earth,” Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in an email.

Rivkin said such alerts could become more common as scientists continually enhance their ability to search for and locate “potential impactors” that are smaller and farther away from Earth. Scientists will have to figure out how to share information publicly in a transparent and timely manner, he said.

“We know it won’t hit the Earth so it’s no risk at all, but this event demonstrates that the system is working to find and characterize possible asteroid threats,” he wrote.

Thomas said the international collaboration that goes into planetary defense, combined with the scientific power of the James Webb Space Telescope, is “phenomenal.”

“We’re really hopeful that this is something that, if we’re in the future in this situation again, we can use to answer very similar questions,” she said.