“Is it true the world will end in September 2027?”
A TikTok video posted June 30 claims a "leaked NASA simulation" predicts an asteroid impact in September 2027. The video (4.2M views) shows a real NASA chart — from a 2021 planetary defense exercise that modeled a hypothetical asteroid to test response procedures. The word "EXERCISE" is cropped out of the frame.
NASA and ESA both maintain public catalogs of every known near-Earth object. Nothing in either catalog has a significant impact probability for 2027 — the highest-rated object for the next century sits at roughly 1-in-2,700, and it isn’t due until 2032.1,2
The chart in the video is real, which is why the rumor works. It comes from a tabletop exercise where scientists practice on an invented asteroid. The scenario documents are public and labeled as fiction on every page.3
One honest caveat: astronomers discover new objects constantly, so “nothing known” is not “nothing ever.” But an object big enough to matter in 2027 would already be visible to thousands of telescopes, and orbit calculations of that kind can’t be hidden — amateurs verify them independently.2