Many blogs and web postings have been talking about a potentially hazardous asteroid that will hit Earth on or before or after Christmas this year. The same asteroid threat had gone viral sometime in September 2015 when a killer asteroid was allegedly going to impact 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.”
Few days ago, these asteroid threats are again going viral over the internet saying that an asteroid as large as the World Trade Center is going to hit our planet before Christmas or after it.
Where did all these rumors come from? Is there any reality in them? So, what does (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) NASA say about those rumors going on? Read on the facts below that I quoted from NASA.
The manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Paul Chodas, said, “there is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.”
NASA said further that NEO Observations Program had not seen nor observed any asteroids or comets that are likely to impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of hitting the Earth in the next 100 years.
According to NASA, “the NEO 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.”
NASA is the only legitimate agency that could give any warning or update about any threat such as asteroid collision impacting the Earth. Its job is to detect, track and characterize 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.
NASA, according to this report explains that “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.” Therefore, there is no need to panic and no reason to believe the viral rumor about an asteroid apocalypse that would end life on Earth. The Earth is safe to live in for the next 100 years. When there will be asteroid or meteor fall that are hazardous to life, it s hoped that by that time NASA would be equipped with technological capacity to crash them even before hitting the Earth’s atmosphere.
Space.com reports that NASA has plans of detecting and destroying asteroids before they hit Earth. So, there is nothing to worry about. Life is beautiful and we should enjoy every second of it!
To know more about these phenomena, pleas go to their website at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch.
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