Gadgetory

This Halloween, Earth is getting a spooky visitor from the depths of outer space. NASA announced last week that a 1300-foot wide asteroid will zoom close to our planet on the afternoon of October 31st. The asteroid — named 2015 TB145 — will come within 1.3 lunar distances of us. That's about 300,000 miles away. It may seem like a haunting encounter, but the truth is there's nothing to fear. The asteroid will simply shriek past us at a whopping 22 miles per second. The object is something of a mad scientist too. It has what is known as an eccentric orbit, meaning it follows a highly elliptical path rather than a circular one. TB145 was first discovered by telescopes in Hawaii on October 10th, so we've only known about it for a little while. The reason for the short warning time is because this object isn't that big in NASA's eyes. In its quest to map near Earth objects, the space agency is primarily concerned with finding the 1-kilometer asteroids — or those that are more than 3,200 feet wide. Asteroids of that size or bigger would wipe us out if they hit our planet. NASA says it knows about a little more than 90 percent of these sized asteroids, and none is slated to hit us any time soon. So to repeat: this will not hit us. But since it's Halloween, let's have a little morbid fun. What would happen if TB145 actually did head our way? The asteroid would still do some scary damage. It’s not small enough to harmlessly burn up in our atmosphere, but it’s not as big as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. An object of this size could wipe out an entire continent. An asteroid that measures around 2,000 feet would be just below the threshold of a global catastrophe. But to aggressively repeat: there's no need to plan for the apocalypse on All Hallow's Eve. Instead, the pumpkin asteroid will provide a great opportunity for NASA astronomers to test out new radar technology. During the asteroid's flyby, scientists will bounce radio waves off the object in order to get a radar image of its surface. Meanwhile, I’ll be cheering them on as I drown myself in Milky Ways.