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Skull-Shaped Zombie Comet Zips Past Earth on Halloween at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday at 78,000 miles per hour.
Skull-Shaped Zombie Comet Zips Past Earth on Halloween – YouTube
A dead comet resembling a human skull zipped past Earth on Saturday,
spooking NASA scientists who didn't see it coming until three weeks ago.
NASA
said Asteroid TB135 — which is actually a comet which has shed its gas
and dust — zoomed past at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday at 78,000 miles per
hour.
At only 300,000 miles away, or 1.3 times the distance from
the Earth to the moon, it's the closest encounter we've had with a large
space object since 2006.
It's about 2,000 feet in diameter, about three times the size of the Coliseum in Rome and fairly large for a near-Earth object.
Denton Ebel of the American Museum of Natural History calls it “a spooky thing.”
“It
wakes us up to fact that we live in a danger zone in the solar system
where stuff is flying around all the time and some things hit the
planet.”
NASA said that since 1998, its near-earth object tracking program has found 90% of objects larger than half a mile.
Source: http://conspireplanet.blogspot.com/2015/10/skull-shaped-zombie-comet-zips-past.html
