Comet Elenin: NASA Declares Doomsday Comet Officially Dead
In a statement released Monday, NASA declared that the once feared doomsday comet Elenin is officially dead, remaining as little more than a cloud of dust.
“Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris cloud that will follow a well-understood path out of the inner solar system,” said Don Yeomans of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement released Monday.
“After that, we won't see the scraps of comet Elenin around these parts for almost 12 millennia,” he added.
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The “doomsday comet” Elenin, which some predicted would usher in the end of the world with a series of tsunamis and earthquakes, glided past earth on Sunday, Oct. 16 in several tiny pieces.
Those tiny pieces have now melted into dust particles barely visible through a telescope.
According to the website Space.com, the comet began deteriorating into several small pieces after an August solar storm and close proximity to the sun caused the 3 mile wide comet to break down.
The comet slowly disintegrated through September and October as it flew within 45 million miles of the sun.
The Discovery News website classified the predicted doomsday comet as being a product of "overactive imaginations of some conspiracy theorists."
NASA issued a Q&A entitled “everything you ever needed to know about Elenin” to quell doomsday speculation.
“Most [comets] pose no threat to earth […] Elenin is not exception,” read the Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA website.
Elenin was closest to earth at 22 million miles away, more than 90 times the distance of the moon from earth, on the evening of Oct. 16.
NASA contends that not only was Elenin in no way going to affect life on earth, but in fact it is small compared to previous comets, being described as a “modest-sized icy dirtball” by Yeomans.
"This is an ex-comet," Yeomans added.
