The US space agency has blown away the ongoing rumour windmill on social media and various posts about a giant space rock impacting the Blue Marble sometime between September 15-28 this year.
“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.
On one of those dates, as rumours go, there will be an impact — ‘evidently’ near Puerto Rico — causing widespread destruction to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US and Mexico as well as Central and South America.
That’s the rumour that has gone viral — now here are the facts.
“In fact, there is no asteroid or comet that will impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future,” Chodas added.
All known ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroids’ have less than a 0.01 per cent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.
“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 said in a statement.
This is not the first time a wild, unsubstantiated claim of a celestial object about to impact Earth has been made.