Dead comet with skull face hurtles safely past Earth on Halloween

A massive space rock that shaved by Earth on Halloween looks like a dead comet with a skull face, NASA said after gaining a closer look at the spooky space object. Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145. But using the US space agency’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts “have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday.

It’s not going to hit us and we will know its orbit really well so we can project it into the future and see whether or not it comes near the earth again and we’ve done that and it’s not going to pose any hazard to the earth in certainly the next century.

Paul Chodas, Nasa

Scientists have also spotted an eerie skull-like resemblance on the face of the rock, based on radar data from the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. There was no danger of it hitting Earth, however. When it zipped by Saturday at 1 pm, it did so at a distance of 302,000 miles. That’s about 1.3 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The data may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby.

Nasa scientist Kelly Fast

Science comet