NASA refutes claims of asteroid hitting Earth next month

NASA

Washington: The US space agency NASA has refuted claims of a giant asteroid hitting the Earth causing massive destruction next month.

Numerous blogs and web postings are erronously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between September 15 and 28, 2015. It claimed that the impact could also cause destruction along coastal regions of the US, Mexico, Central America and South America.

That's the rumor that has gone viral -- now here are the facts, said NASA in a press release.

“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.

If there were any observations on anything headed our way, Chodas and his colleagues would know about it.

“If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now,” he stated.

Such rumours are no stranger to NASA anymore. In 2011, there was remour about comet Elenin impacting Earth. Then there were Internet assertions surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar on December 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.

(Source: NASA)