It will miss us by 1.3 Lunar Distances?
From The Register:
Made you jump! Space to give Earth an asteroid Halloween scare
NASA warns cosmic rock travelling at ludicrous velocity
Halloween is traditionally a time for scares and the universe hasn't disappointed, sending a fast-moving asteroid down our way for a close encounter on October 31 at 1712 UTC (1012 PDT).
The asteroid, dubbed 2015 TB145, was only spotted 10 days ago by astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS I telescope in Hawaii and is thought to be a stray part of a comet. It's quite big as asteroids go, around a third of a kilometer across, but it's traveling at 35 kilometers per second, meaning when it hits something the results will be spectacular.
The asteroid will come within 498,896 kilometers of Earth, or about 1.3 times the distance between us and the Moon. That's the nearest asteroid flyby since 2006, and there won't be another one as close until August 2027, when 1999 AN10 comes to within one Moon's distance to Earth.
At least, that's what we hope. Given this asteroid was only spotted ten days ago it's perfectly possible that there are more out there waiting to skim by, or maybe hit us....MORE1 LD = 238,855.633 miles, the distance between Earth and the Moon.
