Will an Asteroid Destroy Earth in September? NASA Has the Answer

NASA has some good news for people worried about a potential asteroid barreling toward the planet and sending us the way of the dinosaurs: The end is not, in fact, near.

Doomsday believers recently latched on to the idea that a giant space rock was going to slam into Earth and possibly destroy everyone and everything that calls it home sometime between Sept. 15 and Sept. 28, CBS News reported. However, according to NASA scientist Paul Chodas, "There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates." 

Chodas has worked at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as part of a team that monitors and tracks so-called near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Such objects include asteroids and comets that have entered our planet's neighborhood. Much of the rocky debris whizzing around our solar system was left over from the creation of the planets billions of years ago, according to NASA.

The hysteria over an anticipated asteroid impact seemed to originate on social media sites like Twitter and YouTube, NBC News reported. 

"If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now," Chodas said in a statement. "Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth. In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century."

NASA spends about $40 million a year tracking asteroids, according to NBC News. The space agency put the likelihood of an asteroid large enough to do real damage hitting earth in the next 100 years at about 0.01%. 

There we have it. The end of summer won't be so catastrophic after all.