Here's another reason to be thankful to God: a 100-foot-wide asteroid capable of killing thousands of people and inflicting serious damage on Earth just flew past our planet on Monday night, proving wrong the doomsday predictions of some pastors.
In a report by NBC News, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spokesman Laurie Cantillo said asteroid 2013 TX68—which is reportedly as big as a yacht—came closest to Earth at about 7 p.m. ET Monday. The space agency, however, could not yet say exactly how close the space rock was to our planet during its safe fly-by.
NASA earlier said the massive asteroid could come as close as 15,000 miles to Earth, but could also fly as far as 3 million miles away from our planet.
There was also a little bit of confusion as to when the asteroid will fly by Earth. Initially, NASA thought the space rock would whizz by our planet on March 5, but it later revised the predicted date of the fly-by to March 8 after the space agency was "able to get a better handle of its orbital path."
Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Propulsion Laboratory (CNEOS), nevertheless gave an assurance that this space rock is not something that the human race should be worried about.
"There is no concern whatsoever regarding this asteroid — unless you were interested in seeing it with a telescope," Chodas said in an earlier interview.
Some Evangelical pastors, however, had dire warnings about how the Earth might be destroyed by the asteroid. End Times pastor Anita Fuentes and her husband Ignacio, for instance, said the combination of the asteroid and the solar eclipse in parts of Asia on Wednesday was ominous.
"This is a big deal," Anita Fuentes told RawStory.com. "This is three biblical events that are going to be taking place in one day... There will be a freak super moon, an eclipse and an asteroid, which covers the sun, moon and the stars."
"This is crazy stuff," she added.
The prediction of doom obviously never materialised. Asteroid 2013 TX68 is now moving away from Earth, according to NASA.
