Agency refutes claims an asteroid will hit us in September

Aug 20, 2015 15:56 GMT  ·  By

There's this rumor that's been going around these past few days and that's done a wonderful job of getting people all worked up. Its plot: an asteroid is now on collision course with Earth and will most definitely hit us sometime in September.

As is always the case with rumors, the details don't quite match up. For starters, the folks responsible for this time-wasting and perfectly nonsensical conundrum seem to be a tad fuzzy about when exactly the impact will occur. Their best guess is sometime between September 15 and 28.

They do, however, agree on the point of impact: somewhere near Puerto Rico. Once again, detailed information like, say, GPS coordinates, is very much absent. Be that as it may, the rumor starters seem to at least know what will happen after the asteroid comes crashing into Earth.

In a nutshell, all hell will break loose. The Atlantic and the Gulf coasts of the US and Mexico will be essentially obliterated, as will be Central and South America. So, yes, better brace yourselves if you live anywhere near these territories.

Unless you're more inclined to trust NASA

Now, rumors about asteroids poised to collide with our planet and wipe out humanity as we know it pop up quite often. Usually, proper astronomers ignore them because, well, they're simply not worth wasting time refuting.

This time around, however, it looks like things got so out of hand that NASA was left with no choice but intervene and put an end to all the madness, the crazy talk and the unfounded panic.

“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.

For those of you who happen to have a soft spot for numbers and mathematical probabilities, here are the chances that an asteroid will hit Earth sometime over the next 100 years: 0.01%.

And this is coming from scientists who use space- and ground-based telescopes to keep track of comets and asteroids passing 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet, so it's safe to assume their predictions are spot on.

“Not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century,” NASA researcher Paul Chodas stressed. So, there you have it, no reason to worry.

Earth imaged by the Terra satellite
Earth imaged by the Terra satellite

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No asteroid will hit us anytime soon, NASA reassures
Earth imaged by the Terra satellite
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