The asteroid 2015 TB145 – also known as the Great Pumpkin or the Halloween asteroid – will miss Earth on October 31, a team of scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) confirms.
This image shows the asteroid 2015 TB145 (small dot at center) as seen by a telescope at ESA’s Teide Observatory, Tenerife, Canary Islands. Image credit: ESA.
2015 TB145 was discovered on October 10, 2015, by astronomers using the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS-1 system.
On October 11, just 12 hours after its discovery, the space rock was first confirmed by the ESA from its observatory in Tenerife, Spain.
The asteroid will safely miss our planet by 300,000 miles (482,800 km), which is further away from Earth than the Moon (1.3 lunar distances), but which is a close pass on a cosmic scale.
It is traveling at about 78,300 mph (35 km/s) with respect to Earth – higher than the typical encounter speed of near-Earth asteroids.
“The fact that such a large near-Earth object (NEO), capable of doing significant damage if it were to strike our planet, was discovered only 21 days before closest approach demonstrates the necessity for keeping daily watch of the night sky,” said Dr Detlef Koschny of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Office.
“There is no chance that the asteroid will hit our planet, neither now nor in the next 100 years at least, and it is not included in ESA’s official NEO Risk List.”
This is a graphic depicting the orbit of 2015 TB145. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Almost nothing is known about the physical characteristics of 2015 TB145, aside what can be inferred from observations to date.
“The diameter of about 1,312 feet (400 m) has a large uncertainty, as is usual in the case of any object for which we do not yet know details, such as its composition,” said Dr Marco Micheli of ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre.
“More accurate information on the size will likely become available once the object is observed by radar, which is expected to occur between now and early November 2015 via NASA’s Goldstone tracking stations and the Green Bank telescope.”
