2028 Asteroid Not Even Close, JPL Experts Say

An asteroid widely reported to be on a near-collision course with Earth actually will miss the planet by 600,000 miles, astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Thursday.

The JPL scientists used new data to calculate the path of the mile-wide planetoid.

On Wednesday, the International Astronomical Union reported that on its closest approach to Earth in 2028, the asteroid is expected to pass within only 30,000 miles of the Earth’s center and that “the chance of an actual collision is small, but one is not entirely out of the question.”

Skeptical of that report, two JPL astronomers--Donald K. Yeomans and Paul W. Chodas--searched their files and found pictures of the heavens taken by the Palomar Observatory telescope in 1990 that contain images of the asteroid, which was then just an unidentified point of light.

To compute a more accurate path for the asteroid’s journey, the astronomers combined the 1990 pictures with more recent observations and found that it will intersect Earth’s orbit in October 2028 at “a rather comfortable distance” of about 600,000 miles--well beyond the moon’s distance from Earth.

The earlier calculations made public by the astronomical union were based on measurements taken last week and included less of the object’s orbital path than the old, archival pictures from Palomar. The astronomers responsible for the original prediction could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Yeomans and Chodas said the new orbital path of the asteroid means it “poses no threat to the Earth whatsoever.”