Whitby & District Astronomical Society

A ‘Spooky’ Halloween Visitor

A large asteroid discovered just a few weeks ago will narrowly miss the Earth on Oct 31st – Halloween.  Nicknamed “the Great Pumpkin” and “Spooky” but technically known as 2015 TB145, is an estimated 1,300ft (400 meters) wide – 20 times bigger than the meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013.  NASA has estimated that it will come closer than any object of its size in the next 20 years.

TB145 will flyby Earth at around 22 miles per second (78,300mph), approximately 300,000 miles (483,000km) from our planet, slightly farther than the moon. 

The asteroid will make its closest approach on 31 October at about 5.05pm GMT.
TB145 has an unusually oblong orbit, in an area searched less often than the flat-disc plane on which the solar system is arranged.  It last passed by in 1975, when the Earth was at a different place in its orbit around the sun and Nasa’s surveys of the sky were far less comprehensive.  In the sky ‘spooky’ is expected to be fairly faint, but can turn to the internet for live telescope views provided by the Virtual Telescope Project.