Predictions of a world-ending asteroid hitting the Earth in the near future are nothing new. Among the latest crop is this one reported by the Huffington Post. A so-called "online community of biblical theorists" believes a huge asteroid will strike the planet sometime in the Sept. 22-28 window, wiping us out.

For reasons unexplained, some of these crackpot predictions gain more traction than others. This one reportedly caught the attention of NASA, which responded with a statement, according to Yahoo News.

According to Yahoo News, a NASA spokesperson said: "NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small. In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years." On the contrary, NASA said in a statement from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, an asteroid designated 1999 FN53 would safely pass more than 26 times the distance of Earth to the moon on May 14. So we're in the clear already.

"To put it another way, at its closest point, the asteroid will get no closer than 6.3 million miles away (10 million kilometers)," the statement said. "It will not get closer than that for well over 100 years. And even then, (119 years from now) it will be so far away it will not affect our planet in any way, shape or form."

For those who are much more scientifically savvy, NASA puts out a table of potential risk of nearby objects colliding with the Earth. The Sentry Risk Table is part of NASA's Nearth Earth Object Program.

The program is part of NASA's asteroid initiative, which includes sending a robotic spacecraft to capture a boulder from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid and move it into a stable orbit around the moon for exploration by astronauts, in support of U.S. plans to travel to Mars, the statement said.

NASA's press office in Washington DC did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment.

From: San Francisco Chronicle

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