The Earth is not quite so doomed, experts said Wednesday. Fears that a giant asteroid could whack into the planet on March 21, 2014 and plunge it into a nuclear winter are misplaced, they said, explaining that fresh calculations showed the monster rock would safely pass us by. The asteroid, known as 2003 QQ47, was first spotted on Aug. 24, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), making a preliminary estimate of its orbit, said there was a tiny chance — one in only 909,000 — that it would collide with Earth. Around two-thirds of a mile across, and hurtling through space at 75,000 miles per hour, 2003 QQ47 would unleash energy equivalent to 350,000 megatons of TNT, or eight million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. 2003 QQ47 was initially graded the lowest step on the Torino scale, which rates the chances of newly discovered asteroids and comets hitting the Earth. This grading means the asteroid is not a significant risk but "merits special monitoring."

But asteroid experts, in a circular distributed among their community on Wednesday and received by AFP, have now downgraded that risk and accused the media of hyping the scare. NASA specialist Ron Baalke said that the agency's Lincoln Near Asteroid Research (LINEAR) telescope in New Mexico was tasked on Tuesday to make further observations of 2003 QQ47.

View: Full Article | Source: Discovery Channel

Seems doubtful to me that if we were in any real danger its presence would have been admitted at all. Though I am sure, as the time draws nearer, we'll hear every sort of rumor imaginable.

Near misses aren't all that uncommon. The only thing that really prevents us from getting constantly hit like our neighboring planets is the fact we have so many neighboring planets and an asteroid belt that are far closer to the Ort Cloud than we are.

this is sumthing like armageddon lol