No, Neither an Asteroid or a Comet will hit us in September

The view of Earth from asteroid 2012 TT5, one of the asteroids listed as the “doomsday” one, shown at closest approach to Earth. You may notice that the Earth is a tiny dot, yep, it is nowhere near us, and not going to hit us, what a surprise.

The intertubes are currently buzzing with rumours about the imminent collision of an asteroid (or  2.5 mile wide comet) with Earth over the next few days (some are quite specific stating that the asteroid or comet will hit on the 23rd of September, others give a range of dates between the 20-30th of September).

The identity of the comet or asteroid is either not given or identified with 2015 GA14 (which misses Earth by 77 times the distance between Earth and the Moon) and 2012 TTD (which misses Earth by 21 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon).  Neither are 2.5 kilometers wide.

There are three other asteroids that come close in this period (33 metres to 100 metres in diameter, nowhere near 2.5 Km wide), but they also miss the Earth by over 14 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. To put this in perspective, Apollo 11, travelling at over 7 kilometers per seconds took 3 days to get from the Earth to the Moon. That’s a long, long way away.

Comet C/2013 US10 will not hit us either.

So not, we are not going to be hit by them. And there are no big asteroids sneaking up on us. Seriously, amateur astronomers are picking up smaller rocks than this all the time so a 2.5 Km rock or comet. Heck, as I write we are watching comet C/2013 US10 head towards perihelion, it is coming nowhere near Earth.

But it should be obvious that this is all a hoax, remember how asteroid DA2013 cl2 was going to wipe out all life on Earth back in 2013? That was a hoax, as was asteroid 2014 AZ5, How about the Mayan Calender apocalypse? Comet Elenin? Comet ISON? All theses “end of the worlds” were hoaxes (although comets Elenin and ISON were real comets, we were never in any danger from them), which passed.

So to help you ignore the hysteria over rocks that will come nowhere near us, I give you the I’ve made a  Celestia file for 2012 TT5.  As usual, copy the data here to a plain text file (2012TT5.ssc) and copy the file to the Celestia extras folder.

====================2012TTD.ssc==========================

"2012 TT5" "Sol"

#Data from MPC http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html
#Epoch 2015 June 27.0 TT = JDT 2457200.5 MPC
#M 346.05031 (2000.0) P Q
#n 0.32951954 Peri. 273.02601 +0.24722473 +0.96748968 T = 2457242.83342 JDT
#a 2.0759423 Node 11.70885 -0.75140474 +0.22617386 q = 0.7171772
#e 0.6545293 Incl. 15.23443 -0.61177679 +0.11317733 Earth MOID = 0.05522 AU
#P 2.99 H 21.7 G 0.15 U 5
#From 59 observations 2012 Oct. 6-Nov. 5, mean residual 0".32.

{
 Class "asteroid"
 Mesh "ky26.cmod"
 Texture "asteroid.jpg"
 Radius 0.1 # maximum semi-axis
 MeshCenter [ -0.000718 -0.000099 0.000556 ]

 EllipticalOrbit
 {
 Epoch 2457200.5 # Epoch 2015 June 27.0 TT = JDT 2457200.5
 Period 2.99 # P
 SemiMajorAxis 2.0759423 # a
 Eccentricity 0.0520041 # e
 Inclination 0.6545293 # Incl.
 AscendingNode 11.70885 # Node
 ArgOfPericenter 273.02601 # Peri
 PericenterDistance 0.7171772 # q
 MeanAnomaly 346.05031 # M
 }

 RotationPeriod 0.9 #Guess

 Albedo 0.15 #Based on typical Stony asteroids, rotation periods vary from one hour to one day

}
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