Oh well, cancel the order for that 10-foot hoagie from Wawa for the asteroid party. It looks like we will not get a visit from Asteroid 2004 MN4 in 2029. I knew that it was just too coincidental that an asteroid would hit us on a Friday the Thirteenth. The way they determined that this would not happen is to put a call out to observatories worldwide to look through their archived sky data and look at it again to see if this asteroid was on any of it. They did, they found, they re-calculated and they canceled the asteroid's date with Earth.
Over the past week, several independent efforts were made to search for pre-discovery observations of 2004 MN4. These efforts proved successful today when Jeff Larsen and Anne Descour of the Spacewatch Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, were able to detect and measure very faint images of asteroid 2004 MN4 on archival images dating to 15 March 2004. These observations extended the observed time interval for this asteroid by three months allowing an improvement in its orbit so that an Earth impact on 13 April 2029 can now be ruled out.
