Doom-mongers claim a massive space rock will hit Puerto Rico some time between September 15 and 28.

“In fact, there is no asteroid or comet that will impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future, ‘ Chodas added”.

“There is no scientific basis – not one shred of evidence – that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth” on the rumored dates, said NASA’s Paul Chodas, manager at NASA’s Near-Earth Object office. The rumor said there would be an asteroid impact “evidently” near Puerto Rico that would devastate the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States along with Central and South America.

But the panic about an upcoming asteroid apocalypse had apparently gone so widely viral that NASA issued a press release Wednesday debunking the theories.

He claimed there was a 0.01% chance of a big-hitting asteroid smashing into earth in the next 100 years.

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the worldwide collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future.

And just to put your mind a little bit more at ease, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program says that if there was a large object barreling towards our planet with the hopes of wiping us out of this universe, they would have seen it by now. “It seems to be a perennial favorite of the World Wide Web”, he commented. In 2011, Comet Elenin was rumoured to impact Earth and internet hype insisted the Mayan calendar would end with a asteroid impact on December 21, 2012.

It’s slowly becoming a yearly tradition for NASA to crush rumors of apocalyptic predictions that are related to space objects or the sun itself bursting, and the internet is certainly the best conductor for it. There are many “asteroid prophecies” out there, and the population is asked not to buy into every single one of them.

Similar rumours spread this year surrounding asteroids 2004 BL86 and 2014 YB35.

“Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth”, said Chodas.

However, this is not to be construed as claim that Earth won’t get hit by a cosmic object next month.

This view of Earth comes from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite.