A recently discovered Near-Earth Asteroid designated "2014 UR116" does not represent an impact threat to our planet, as some media reports claim, NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office said in a press release yesterday.
"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 it's orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth's orbit," their report said.
Furthermore, they say, the Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge Massachusetts, Tim Spahr, has also re-computed this object's orbit after noticing that it was the same as an object observed six years ago. Using both sets of observations, the future motion of this asteroid was carried further forward in time using the automatic computations made by the Sentry system at JPL. These computations rule out this object as an impact threat to Earth (or any other planet) for at least the next 150 years.
