No asteroid threatening Earth in September ‘NASA’

NASA’s Paul Chodas, the manager of the organization’s Near-Earth Object division, was decisive in his polemic against the rumors floating around the internet not unlike loose objects flying through space.

NASA shot down numerous web postings this week, saying that rumors of an asteroid heading for Puerto Rico and bringing with it much destruction are utterly false.

Despite these statistics, including the extremely low 1 in 700,000 percent chance of dying from an asteroid collision, the nature of the internet to quickly disseminate information of all types – regardless of authenticity – has once again led to a rampant proliferation of disinformation.

A surprising number of blogs and websites made posts recently about a deadly impact with a giant asteroid somewhere near in the Caribbean this September, which would generate shockwaves throughout the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts and deep into Central and South America.

And as such, Chodas concludes, “

There is no scientific basis – not one shred of evidence – that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.”

He goes on to say, “All known potentially hazardous asteroids have less than 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years”.

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the worldwide collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet. As an alternative, it broke up into small items in area. He adds that if there were anything that big enough that can allow that kind of mass destruction on the planet on September then we could have detected it by now. At the end of July , NASA released a video of a celestial object that passed by just 4.5 million miles from Earth. “In truth, not a single one of many recognized objects has any credible probability of hitting our planet over the subsequent century”.