Asteroids will kill Earth in September?
OK, I like a good story and when we were kids, the ghosts that threatened fellow campers long ago were fodder for fun at the evening campsite.
But when internet rumors of death and destruction run wild enough that NASA itself has to come out with an official statement that we are NOT going to die … well that’s just silly.
And that’s pretty much what happened. If you look at the recent internet panic, it sure appears like we are about to die in September like the dinosaurs did eons ago
Take a look at the article below and decide for yourself who you believe …
News | August 19, 2015
NASA: There is No Asteroid Threatening Earth
This view of Earth comes from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite. Image credit: NASA
Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept. 15 and 28, 2015. On one of those dates, as rumors go, there will be an impact — “evidently” near Puerto Rico — causing wanton destruction to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States and Mexico, as well as Central and South America.
…… “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 says 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% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.
…… Another thing Chodas and his team do know — this isn’t the first time a wild, unsubstantiated claim of a celestial object about to impact Earth has been made, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last. It seems to be a perennial favorite of the World Wide Web.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.”
To read the full article, please visit the article source at JPL News
Cover photo Credit: Don Davis/NASA