The celestial event will be closely followed by NASA, and the images will be broadcast online. The Dawn spacecraft slipped into orbit around the asteroid on July 15, and for the next year will gather pictures and information.
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An asteroid will move past Earth on Halloween.
Ok, so that might not seem very close, but rest assured it is very close.
The Halloween asteroid is estimated to be 1,300-foot-wide (400-meter) and will be flying past Earth on October 31 at 10:05 a.m. PDT (1:05 p.m. EDT) at a safe distance of 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers).
A few folks on social media today are saying the end is nigh – citing Earth’s upcoming close encounter with a fast-moving rock larger than the third tallest building in New York City.
NASA’s calling the asteroid 2015 TB145, but it’s already received a festive nickname: “Spooky”. The asteroid has a diameter of approximately 400 meters (1,300 feet), and will pass within approximately 480,000 km (300,000 miles) of Earth. Although somewhat late, the discovery showed the competence and thoroughness of NASA surveys.
The asteroid will come within 498,896 kilometers of Earth and is said to be the nearest asteroid flyby since 2006. This is 1.3 times the average distance that is located between Earth and the moon. He would not expect several asteroids to have the same orbit as 2015 TB145. Most of these are in orbits that are easier to detect.
The asteroid is set to be at its closest point to Earth at around 1:18 pm ET.
By the way, 78,000 miles per hour is approximately equivalent to 1300 miles per minute or 22 miles per second.
Though early reports suggested the asteroid was on a collision course for Earth, scientists say this is not the case.
All of this work will give us a little insight into the size, shape and other surface features that the asteroid might have.
As of now, astronomers at NASA have kept a close eye and are monitoring every activity of the asteroid with help of multiple optical observatories including Deep Space Network at Goldstone, California.
NASA estimates that the asteroid has a diameter between 918 to 2,034 feet.
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The Center for NEO Studies at JPL is a central node for NEO data analysis in NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program and a key group involved with the worldwide collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could be a hazard to impact our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future.
