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Astronomers monitoring near-Earth objects are playing down the chances of a newly discovered asteroid hitting Earth in 2014
Kevin Yates could not foresee the global media circus and public anxiety he would fuel last week with a routine Web posting about a potentially dangerous asteroid.
The main reason for downplaying the asteroid danger in 2014 is that further observations and calculations showed that the asteroid would not actually impact Earth.
The asteroid, known as 2014 UR116, was estimated to be around 400 meters in diameter.
The asteroid came within 2.7 million kilometers of Earth, which is more than 7 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
If the asteroid had impacted Earth, it could have caused significant damage and potential loss of life, depending on where it hit.
Asteroids come close to Earth relatively frequently, but most of them are small and pose no real danger. However, larger asteroids that could potentially cause significant damage are rarer and are closely monitored by scientists.