Giant asteroid will miss earth by 15m miles: NASA

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BRENT: Space agency takes unusual step of issuing the all-clear amid fears that asteroid 8666 (2000 FL 10) was headed right for us
The doom-mongers have already been proved wrong once this week, when a date for the end of the world passed without incident on Wednesday. Now the world has been given a second reprieve.
Nasa has confirmed that a giant asteroid will pass safely by Earth on Saturday.
At 1.5 miles wide, a collision with asteroid 86666 (2000 FL 10) would be catastrophic.
But on Friday Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s Near Earth Object Office, which tracks asteroids, said it would not come closer than 15m miles (about half the distance between the Earth and Mars).
Online conspiracy theorists claimed one would crash into Puerto Rico in September, causing widespread devastation to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the US, Mexico and Southern America.
Nasa tracks and characterises asteroids and comets passing within 30 million miles of Earth using telescopes on the ground and in space.
Overall the risk of a collision in the next 100 years is negligible. More precisely all known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, as they are described, have less than a 0.01 per cent chance of hitting Earth in the next 100 years.