NASA has announced that an asteroid will be taking a spin past our planet on October 31, 2015.
The asteroid, which is roughly the size of a skyscraper (about 1,542 feet in diameter), will fly by at a distance of 310,000 miles, which puts it just about 100,000 miles further away from us than the moon. It’ll speed at a distance of 78,000 mph.
Says NASA in their report, “This is the closest approach by a known object this large until 1999 AN10 approaches within 1 lunar distance in August 2027.”
But they’re not worried, so you shouldn’t be, either. “The flyby presents a truly outstanding scientific opportunity to study the physical properties of this object,” the report reads.
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In fact, we can all breathe easy for a while: This summer, NASA released a statement claiming, “All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01 percent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.”
The only real downside to this news is that scientists only discovered the asteroid three weeks before its scheduled flyby. It’s hard to accurately predict all incoming asteroids, which means that NASA’s safety precautions if an asteroid sets course for Earth might not be enacted in time.
But hey. It’s Halloween. What would be the fun in a scary night if there wasn’t a small chance of annihilation by extraterrestrial objects, eh?
According to EarthSky.org, you should be able to see this asteroid during the early hours of October 31, with the help of a telescope. Unfortunately, with a brightness magnitude of 10, it won’t be visible to the naked eye.
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