Looks like we’re going to have a scary near-miss with an asteroid and of COURSE it’s on Halloween
Vampires and werewolves have some scare-competition this Halloween in the form of an asteroid that’s going to be flying a LITTLE too close for comfort past Earth on October 31.
Look, it is a truth universally acknowledged that asteroids are inherently scarier than monsters. Vampires can be repelled with garlic and holy water, and as long as you’re not wandering the woods during the night of a full moon, you should be fine on the werewolf front. But there is no avoiding a Deep Impact/Armageddon situation with an asteroid on a crash-collision course with Earth. Barring Bruce Willis helming a dangerous space mission in which he drills into the asteroid’s surface and detonates a nuclear bomb, an asteroid headed for Earth can safely be considered the Grandaddy of All Things To Be Nervous About This Halloween.
So how close is asteroid 2015 TB145, coming, anyway? As NASA explained in a statement, it’ll be about 310,000 miles from Earth when it passes us (as a reference, the moon is 238,900 miles from Earth), and it will be racing by at 78, 293 miles. It’s the closest an asteroid has come to Earth since 1999, and we probably won’t see an object get this close until 2027.
So those of you who are a little nervous about an asteroid hitting Earth and ruining all our lives forever (re: me, every night in my nightmares), rest easy knowing that, as of now, NASA doesn’t see any asteroids coming our way as any kind of major threat.
“All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01 percent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years,” the agency said in a statement this summer.
All right, so we don’t have to spend all our time being scared of the Halloween Asteroid, we can return to being scared of all other Halloween-related threats: zombies and ghosts and next-door-neighbors who give out lame candy for Trick-or-treating, oh my!
Related:
Guys. Earth came thisclose to getting hit by an asteroid yesterday
(Image via Touchstone.)