On this day in space! Oct. 31, 2015: Skull-shaped Halloween asteroid flies by Earth

On October 31, 2015, an asteroid shaped like a human skull flew by Earth. It arrived with excellent timing on Halloween, which made the already-creepy asteroid even creepier.

During its closest approach, it was about 300,000 miles from Earth, or 1.3 times the average distance between Earth and the moon. So, it didn't pose a threat to our planet. It was discovered by astronomers at Hawaii's Pan-STARRS observatory only three weeks before the flyby, and it was given the official designation "2015 TB145." But no one knew what it looked like until the day before Halloween, when the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico captured the first radar images.

A grainy black and white image of a skull-shaped asteroid in the darkness of space. — This radar image of asteroid 2015 TB145, which NASA says is likely a dead comet, was captured using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on Oct. 30, 2015 with a resolution of 25 feet per pixel. The skull shaped asteroid flew by Earth on Halloween (Oct. 31). (Image credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF)

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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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