The contours of the asteroid’s surface gave it an eerie resemblance to objects associated with the Halloween holiday – a pumpkin, according to a few, and a skull by others’ reckoning. “This is attractive. It’s such a high-resolution, nice image”. Thought to be a dead comet, this scary-looking asteroid measured in at approximately 2,000 feet across and was first discovered on October 10th. On top of that, they noted that the object’s surface was surprisingly bright, suggesting that the asteroid might be the dead husk of a comet.
Advertisement
A few of the radar images showed a space rock that “appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby”, Kelly Fast of NASA said.
The asteroid, officially named 2015 TB145, trekked by Earth at 1PM ET on Halloween afternoon, zooming by at 22 miles per second. The rebounding waves were fielded by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank Telescope located in West Virginia. “But instead of transmitting visible light, we’re transmitting microwaves and these microwaves are bouncing off the asteroid and we are receiving it back”.
Scientists also consider this as a great opportunity for tracking space objects to develop counter measures and strategies against near Earth objects such as asteroids that can collide and strike the planet.
“That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only three to five percent of the light”, he continued.
“In addition, its orbit is “very oblong with a high inclination to below the plane of the solar system”, Lance Benner, who leads NASA’s asteroid radar research program, said in an earlier JPL statement”.
Advertisement
The next time that asteroid 2015 TB145 will be in Earth’s neighborhood will be in September 2018, when it will make a distant pass at about 24 million miles (38 million kilometers), or about a quarter the distance between Earth and Sunday.
