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No Asteroid Threat to Earth, Says NASA

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NASA has said that there is no evidence to support the claims that a devastating asteroid will hit Earth sometime between September 15 and 28.

The rumor about the asteroid was posted on numerous blogs and web postings, claiming that there will be an asteroid collision near Puerto Rico causing immense destruction to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States and Mexico, as well as Central and South America.

"There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates,"Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in the press release. "If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now."

NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program has said that it has observed no asteroids or comets that would hit Earth anytime in the future. The Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," is able to predict the path of the asteroids to determine if any could be dangerous 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.

The known Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.

"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."

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