LOS ANGELES -- A giant asteroid that astronomers initially thought could crash into the earth in about 17 years will instead pass harmlessly by, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

The mile-wide (2km-wide) asteroid made the front pages of U.S. newspapers and raised the interest of professional and amateur astronomers around the world when it was recently spotted and thought to be on a collision course with earth.

But in a statement issued on its web site on Sunday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said new observations had determined that the asteroid would miss the earth after all.

"With the processing of a few more observations of asteroid 2002 NT7 through July 28, we can now rule out any earth impact possibilities for February 1, 2019," Reuters quoted JPL as saying in the statement.

"While we cannot yet completely rule out an impact possibility on February 1, 2060, it seems very likely that this possibility will be soon ruled out as well," the lab said.

Scientists say a collision with a large asteroid half a mile or 1km in diameter could kill a quarter of the world's population. Statistically, every 100 million years a 6-mile-wide (10km-wide) object hits the earth in an impact like one that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The new asteroid was spotted earlier this month.

Now 66 million miles (km100 million) away, it orbits the sun every 2.3 years at a steep angle to earth's orbit.