Something strange will appear in the skies this Halloween, and it’s not a witch on a broomstick. NASA says an asteroid dubbed the “great pumpkin” will fly by Earth on Oct. 31 at 1:01 p.m. E.T.
Asteroid 2015 TB145 measures about 1,300 feet wide and is expected to pass our planet at a distance of about 300,000 miles—or 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the moon. “Even though that is relatively close by celestial standards,” said the manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “it is expected to be fairly faint, so night-sky Earth observers would need at least a small telescope to view it.”
The next time an asteroid is predicted to pass so close to Earth is in 2027.
Categories: Science and Technology