That is far outside the orbit of the moon, which is about 240,000 miles from the Earth. There's a danger that people will no longer take impact warnings seriously. Brian Marsden, the scientist who predicted the asteroid's too-close orbit, disputed this. Even if its present trajectory is capable of carrying it safely past the Earth, any small perturbation could put it on Earth's track. On Thursday evening, the International Astronomical Union released a bulletin agreeing with the JPL calculations.
Nobody can argue with it.
This sort of puts the nail in the coffin. Chodas said just to be sure, the JPL team was not saying XF11 would definitely not collide with the Earth. But it is very, very tiny and the impact is extremely unlikely. Chodas said the asteroid was in an elliptical orbit around the sun just slightly, about four degrees, at an angle to Earth's. It takes about 21 months to complete an orbit.