The Halloween asteroid, nickcnamed by NASA as "The Great Pumpkin," could have created a continent-wide devastation if it had not missed Earth, NBC reported.
Formally known as the 2015 TB145, "The Great Pumpkin" measures about 1,300 feet in diameter and is moving through space at 22 miles per second. It has an unusual egg-shaped orbit and according to NBC, it is on a plane that is very different from the rest of the solar system. On Halloween, it will miss Earth by approximately 300,000 at its closest point, which according to NASA, is "astronomically a pretty close passage."
NASA, who has been closely observing the Halloween asteroid, also said (via The Times Of India) on Friday that the large space rock may be a dead comet and that it resembles a skull. Kelly Fast, a programme scientist in NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at Maunakea, Hawaii, said, "The IRTF data may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo [Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico] images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby."
And while astronomers are happy that it will just pass by the planet, they are also excited about having the opportunity to study "The Great Pumpkin," addressing the scientists' needed knowledge of asteroids.
"We need to know more about asteroid," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We don't know much about their structure, how strong they are, their minerology. If we were ever to have to deflect an asteroid, we would want to know these things."
Chodas confirmed that NASA is now studying on how to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. NASA has already identified half on nearly 10,000 asteroids with the same size as "The Great Pumpkin" that are flying within 30 million miles of Earth.
1,000 of these asteroids are near the Earth and are a kilometer or larger in diameter, capable to destroy an entire continent or cause a global catastrophe. "They come in with so much energy, it would create a huge crater, and have all kinds of effects on the climate and environment."
