There is no asteroid threatening Earth, says Nasa

[Night Hunter]

Nasa has been forced to issue a statement confirming that there is no deadly asteroid threatening Earth after an internet rumour went viral sparking panic.

Recent web postings suggested a deadly space rock would crash into Peurto Rico between September 15 and September 28 causing widespread devastation to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US, Mexico and Southern America.

But the US space agency said there was no asteroid scheduled to pass anywhere near Earth during those dates.

"There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In fact NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program said there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future.

All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01 per cent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the international collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future.

Mr Chodas said he would be the first to know if any dangerous objects were heading our way.

"If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now," he stated.

It isn’t the first time that the internet has made an unsubstantiated claim about a dangerous celestial object heading towards Earth.

In 2011 there were rumors about the so-called “doomsday” comet Elenin, which never posed any danger of harming Earth and broke up into a stream of small debris out in space.

Then there were Internet assertions surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012, insisting the world would end with a large asteroid impact.

And just this year, asteroids 2004 BL86 and 2014 YB35 were said to be on dangerous near-Earth trajectories, but their flybys of our planet in January and March went without incident -- just as NASA said they would.

"Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth," said Chodas.

"In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century."

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing 30 million miles of Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes.

The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes the physical nature of a subset of them, and predicts their paths to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to Earth.

 

s: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

[ajnl]

That's exactly what NASA would say if there was an asteroid threatening Earth!