There is no asteroid coming to kill us all: NASA

By Jamie Lendino 

Such is the world we live in these days that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration feels the need to issue an official statement on how we’re all not going to die in an Earth-shattering collision with a giant asteroid next month. But that’s the way the Internet-powered rumor mill churns, so here we are.

First, the erroneous rumor: A massive asteroid will smash into our planet, ‘evidently’ near Puerto Rico, sometime between September 15th and 28th, 2015 that will cause tremendous destruction on the US Atlantic and Gulf coast, as well as Mexico, Central America, 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 the statement. “If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now.”

The actual truth is that NASA has been monitoring these things, courtesy of the Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and every known object on the list has less than a 0.01 percent chance of impact within the next 100 years. The agency tracks and records asteroids and comets passing within 30 miles of Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes, it said in the statement, and that there are no known credible threats to date — “only the continuous and harmless infall of meteroids, tiny asteroids that burn up in the atmosphere.”

Also, NASA normally knows exactly when something like this would happen if it were true, and wouldn’t give a ridiculous two-week window of uncertainty, given that right now we can calculate the exact date of Halley’s comet’s return on July 28, 2061 down to the minute.

Recall all of the recent doomsday predictions, such as all those “near miss” asteroids that were anything but; the supposed end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012; and of course Harold Camping and his total BS tour from back in 2011 predicting the end of the world.

“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.”

I have a feeling ExtremeTech readers weren’t particularly worried about this, but just in case, there are the facts.