BREAKING NEWS

NASA releases official statement: 'Asteroid will not destroy Earth'

By JPOST.COM STAFF

AUGUST 21, 2015 10:08

After numerous blog posts and websites published reports claiming that a large, potentially hazardous asteroid was heading towards Earth, NASA released an official statement on its website Wednesday confirming that "there is not an asteroid threatening Earth."

The false reports, which predicted that the asteroid would impact Earth sometime between September 15 and 28, were shot down by The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, referred to as the "Spaceguard," which monitors astral material orbiting around Earth.

"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.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program stated that they have not observed any asteroids or comets 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, the report said.

This is not the first time doomsday rumors went viral on internet forums. In 2011, reports circulated around the web that the comet Elenin, which "never posed an danger of harming earth," was headed to destroy the world. In 2012, there were Internet assertions surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, that insisted the world would end with a large asteroid impact. In both cases, the near-Earth trajectories passed by Earth without incident.

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