An asteroid or anything like that is not going to hit Earth in
September. Lately on the Internet, numerous stories have been saying that,
between September 15 to 28 this year, an asteroid four kilometers (2.5 miles)
wide will knockout Puerto Rico, destroying much of the Atlantic and Gulf shores
of the U.S. and Mexico, and also Central and South America. The theory appears
to have initiated from Reverend Efrain Rodriguez, who “sent a letter” to NASA
in 2010 cautioning of an asteroid impact in 2015. Mainly overlooked at the
time, numerous websites and videos have now picked up on the claim and conveyed it
as fact. Well there is no such asteroid or comet exists. How do we know this?
Well thanks to NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) office at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in California, we know that there is nothing like that going
to happen next month. NASA’s Near-Earth Object is able to track all Potentially
Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) of a rational size. We know of numerous other PHAs,
some that will come near to Earth (but not impact) in the next almost 100
years, but there is basically no noteworthy object that will smash our planet
any time soon, particularly not next month.
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| Image credit: We're all going to die one day. Eventually. But not due to an asteroid next month. solarseven/Shutterstock. |
This story of asteroid impact has since gone viral, so much so
that NASA has given out a infrequent statement confirming that, no, apocalypse
is not around the corner, something the agency is normally hate to do. Paul
Chodas, manager of NASA's NEO office, said in the statement. "There is no
scientific basis – not one shred of evidence – that an asteroid or any other
celestial object will impact Earth on those dates. 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 danger of asteroids and comets to Earth, however, is
very real. Many researchers have been demanding for a better Earth defense and
detection system, to make sure we can find and terminate any possibly
world-ending asteroids in future. Certainly, some small rocks, like the
Chelyabinsk meteor in February 2013, do succeed to trick the radar. But
something as wide as four kilometers is basically too big not to be seen, and
there's nothing in the close future that poses a real danger. According to NASA
the chance of a large asteroid striking Earth in the next 100 years at 0.01%.
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