[meteorite-list] There is No Asteroid Threatening Earth in September 2015

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4692

NASA: There is No Asteroid Threatening Earth
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
August 19, 2015

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.

That's the rumor that has gone viral -- now here are the facts.

"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.

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the international 
collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky 
with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our 
planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future. 
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.

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."

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing 30 
million miles of Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. 
The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," 
discovers these objects, characterizes the physical nature of a subset 
of them, and predicts their paths to determine if any could be potentially 
hazardous to our planet. There are no known credible impact threats to 
date -- only the continuous and harmless infall of meteoroids, tiny asteroids 
that burn up in the atmosphere.

JPL hosts the office for Near-Earth Object orbit analysis for NASA's Near 
Earth Object Observations Program of the Science Mission Directorate in 
Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology 
in Pasadena.

More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is at:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch ,

and on Twitter: @asteroidwatch


Media Contact

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle at jpl.nasa.gov 

2015-272