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.
Dead comet that will safely fly past Earth today eerily resembles a skull: https://t.co/8bq4UBrFO9 #HappyHalloween pic.twitter.com/dIN6pDgJVc
— NASA (@NASA) October 31, 2015
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 Colosseum 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.
Watch the report above.
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