After passing through Earth on October 31, barely 480,000 kilometers from us, a team of NASA astronomers has processed the radar images of the asteroid, obtaining high-resolution snapshots of the so-called 2015 TB145, “Halloween asteroid” or “Great Pumpkin” , due to both its shape and its passage on a day as particular as the celebration of the Halloween party.
To get the best images of the asteroid (4 meters per pixel), scientists used giant Earth radio telescopes to bounce radar signals off spherical rock about 600 meters in diameter at the Observatory’s National Radio Astronomy 100-meter telescope. in Green Bank, West Virginia (USA), which revealed areas of the asteroid’s surface not seen before: bright spots (perhaps rocks), very pronounced cavities and a series of other characteristics “that could be ridges” , explains Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (USA)
Benner clarifies that “the images look clearly different from the Arecibo radar images obtained on October 30 and are probably the result of seeing the asteroid from a different perspective , in its three-hour rotation period.”
2015 TB145 will fly over Earth again. This time in September 2018, although it will not pass that close; It will do so at a distance of about 38 million kilometers, that is, a quarter of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, approximately.
