Nasa: Doomsday asteroid won't destroy Earth in fiery apocalypse come September

US space agency Nasa has said that rumours of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth heralding widespread destruction are greatly exaggerated. Stories had been popping up around the internet saying that between 15 and 28 September, an asteroid would crash into our planet, somewhere near to Puerto Rico, which would be catastrophic to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US.

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

And if that isn't enough to settle conspiracy theorists' nerves, then Nasa says that its Near-Earth Object Observations Program predicts that there is a 0.001% chance of a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid hitting us within the next 100 years. "There is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth," Chodas continued. "In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century."