Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth. However, NASA experts say that there is no scientific basis that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.
That’s the rumor that has gone viral – now here are the facts.
“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 Lab, Pasadena, California.
In fact, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have l<0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.
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 alendar 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.
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 our planet. There are no known credible impact threats to date — only the continuous and harmless infall of meteoroids, tiny asteroids that burn up in the atmosphere.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4692
Trajectory of comet Elenin that did not harm Earth. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech…..NASA scientists now provide real science to debunk wild Internet rumors about an alleged September asteroid impact
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