NASA assures asteroid won’t hit Earth amid doomsday warning from conspiracy theorists

Conspiracy theorists are using March’s astronomical events to sow fear in the hearts of people for natural phenomena that take place within days. Their doomsday warning, however, has been dashed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

A solar eclipse, followed by a lunar eclipse, bundled with an asteroid flyby are the perfect cosmic events cited by so-called Internet pastors, Anita and Ignacio Fuentes, in a YouTube video, that the world would end. They warned that the freak supermoon, eclipse and asteroid happen on the same day, March 8, which had already passed with no Apocalypse happening.

NASA, which revised the estimated date of the 2013 Asteroid TX68 flyby from March 5 to March 8, assures that it would not hit Earth. Moreover, the solar eclipse is on March 9 and not 8 as mentioned by the Fuentes couple.

Paul Chodas, manager of the NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) said that additional data allowed them to get a better handle of 2013 TX68's orbital path, resulting in the change of forecast day of flyby by three days. The additional data even say that the small asteroid will likely pass much farther away from the Earth than previously thought, Chodas says.

The latest forecast of CNEOS is that the asteroid would fly about 3 million miles (5 million kilometres) away from Earth. Chodas adds there is a chance that it could pass closer, but the closest is 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometres) above the planet’s surface.

With CNEOS’s forecast that 2013 TX68 could not impact Earth over the next 100 years, Chodas stresses, “There is no concern whatsoever regarding this asteroid – unless you were interested in seeing it with a telescope.”

CNET reports that the asteroid, dubbed B2Bomber, has passed by Earth on Monday, according to a report from the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.

Meanwhile, CNN reports that thousands of Jakarta residents went to the city’s planetarium at dawn to view the total solar eclipse. There were long queues to the special viewing glasses, with lines starting as early as 2 am.

Given the sophisticated equipment used by NASA and other space agencies, backed by constant assurances from space experts that Earth is safe from any collisions, the work ahead is to continue destroying myths surrounding these solar and lunar events, especially eclipses which ancient belief attributes to the devil eating the Sun.

Citing the book “Beyond the Blue Horizon: Myths and Legends of the Sun, Moon, Stars and Planets,” authored by Los Angeles-based Griffith Observatory Director and astronomer Edwin Krupp, CBS notes that because of the ancient beliefs, people responded with terror and anticipation of disaster which some continue until today.

It was particularly true for eclipses based on an account by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a Spanish missionary who was with the Aztecs in central Mexico during the 16^th century. The fray described the Aztec’s reaction to the eclipse as with “a tumult and disorder.”

People were shouting all over the place. Light-skinned people were slain as sacrifices. The demons of darkness will then come down and eat men. Those reactions are not much different from warnings given by hoax news makers of long days of darkness due to natural occurrences such as planetary alignments.