"We know the time that the object is going to be closest within seconds, and the distance is known within hundreds of kilometers (miles)," Davide Farnocchia, a mathematician at NASA's Near-Earth
Object program, said by telephone on Tuesday.
Paul Chodas, from the Near-Earth
Object Program, said: "There is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth.
NASA's Near-Earth
Object Program seeks to find all Earth-crossing NEOs with a diameter greater than 1 kilometer and perihelion less than 1.3 astronomical units.
According to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth
Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., there are only three ways to increase our chances against an asteroid aimed at Earth: "Find it early; find it early; find it early."
Table 8 lists all NEOs that come within 0.05 AU of the Earth during 2014, as computed by NASA's Near-Earth
Object Program.
"There were inklings of this before, but this is the strongest statement that's been made," says Paul Chodas, a planetary scientist with NASA's Near Earth
Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
However, instead of the expected reduction, the NASA's Near-Earth
Object Program has increased the likelihood that the asteroid will strike Earth is closer to 1 in 9,090, CBS News reports.
"To put it another way, that puts the current probability of no impact in 2032 at about 99.998 percent," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth
Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
While there are thousands of asteroids that size out there, finding the right one that comes by Earth at just the right time to be captured will not be easy, said Donald Yeomans, who heads NASA's Near Earth
Object program that monitors close-by asteroids.
Donald Yeomans, manager of US Near Earth
Object Program in California, said he thought the event was probably "an exploding fireball event".
For such a book to be successful, it needs to be written by someone who is a recognised authority on the subject, and in Don Yeomans we have such a person who, having held the enviable position of Manager of NASA's Near-Earth
Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena since 1998, has lived and breathed NEOs over many years now.
object program - a fully compiled or assembled program ready to be loaded into the computer