According to the information offered by NASA, the asteroid named 4660 Nereus is heading towards the Earth, getting closer from a distance of 3.9 millions kilometers.
The information shared by the scientists say that the object has a 330 meters long diameter, a size that is close to that of Eiffel Tower.
This is one of the four instances that the asteroid approaches the Earth. The object that was discovered in 1982 orbits around the Sun every 664 days.
According to NASA, the asteroid will be the closest to our planet on December 12. The distance of 3.9 millions kilometers that is between the object and the Earth equals to approximately 10 times of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Also, the asteroid is labeled by experts as "potentially dangerous". However, the possibility for it the become a threat to the Earth is quite low because of how far it will be from the Earth while it passes.
Before this, Nereus got close to the Earth in 2002 and, according to the calculations, it will get closer again in 2060 and 2071. For the 2060 approach, it is being estimated that the celestial body will be passing with a 1.2 millions kilometers of distance.
It is also important to remember that these days NASA is preparing for a mission that seeks to send a spacecraft to collide with the small asteroid Didymos.
The idea behind this project is to prove that this kind of a spacecraft is able to navigate autonomically to an asteroid and that it can "hit it kinetically".
The investigators also intend to discover whether it is possible to avoid in this way a possible collision between a bigger object and the Earth.
