WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- NASA issued a statement Monday insisting that newly identified asteroid 2014 UR116 isn't an immediate threat to Earth. In the wake of the asteroid's discovery, ominous new reports (mostly from Russian media sources) suggested the mountain-sized rock could potentially collide with Earth during one of its triennial flybys.
"While this approximately 400-meter sized asteroid has a three year orbital period around the sun and returns to the Earth's neighborhood periodically, it does not represent a threat because its orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth's orbit," NASA officials wrote in their released statement.
According to NASA, Tim Spahr, the director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, used data collected from an Near Earth Object with a similar orbit to project UR116's future trajectory. His number crunching confirmed the false alarm.
"These computations rule out this object as an impact threat to Earth (or any other planet) for at least the next 150 years," officials with NASA' Near Earth Object (NEO) Program concluded.
B612 Impact Video 4-20-14 H264 from Spine Films on Vimeo.
Last week, a group of scientists and citizen-astronomers -- including former Queen guitarist Brain May, who has a PhD in astrophysics -- encouraged a stronger push for experimental asteroid-location and deflection technologies.
"Nasa has done a very good job of finding the very largest objects, the ones that would destroy the human race," Ed Lu, a former astronaut who thrice crewed the International Space Station, told the Financial Times. "It's the ones that would destroy a city or hit the economy for a couple of hundred years that are the problem."
NASA isn't completely ignoring the warnings from these vocal scientists. It is currently hosting a competition for crowd-sourced asteroid detection algorithms, and it has entertained some ideas on how to potentially deflect an asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth.
