'Halloween asteroid looks like a skull'

Washington, October 31 :A large space rock that will zip past the Earth this Halloween on Saturday is most likely a dead comet that bears an eerie resemblance to a skull, said US space agency SA. Discovered three weeks ago, the asteroid, 2015 TB145, will fly by our planet at just 1.3 lur distances, or about 490,000 km, at 1.00 p.m. on Saturday, that means it will pose no threat to the Earth, Xinhua quoted the space agency as saying. Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with SA’ s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Maukea, Hawaii, determined that the celestial object may have shed its volatility after numerous passes around the sun. Radar images generated by the US tiol Science Foundation’s 305-metre Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico showed the object is spherical in shape and about 600 metres in diameter.(IANS)