NASA Alert! Asteroid bigger than Eiffel Tower headed our way by next week! Hit or miss?

An egg-shaped asteroid is rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’ its way to us and is expected to enter Earth’s orbit within a week or so.

This 330-metre-long chunk of rock would cover an entire football field, scientists say. And it has a name.

Remember the name: 4660 Nereus. Let’s just refer to it as Nereus for now.

The Sun newspaper reports that the Nereus is expected to skim past Earth on Dec 11.

“Skim” is a relative term. Conservative space agencies consider every fast-moving space object that comes within 7.48 million kilometres (4.65 million miles) is deemed “potentially hazardous.” A slight change in their trajectory might spell doom for Earth.

Nereus is estimated to approach as close as 4.02 million km (2.5 million miles) to our planet. Coming this close qualifies Nereus to be classified as  “potentially hazardous”.

Because Nereus passes close to Earth fairly regularly, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japanese space agency JAXA had explored the idea of “punching” the asteroid off course using the Hayabusa spacecraft.

Instead, the space agencies decided to focus their Double Asteroid Redirection Test toward another asteroid, 25143 Itokawa.

This year, scientists expect Nereus to pass within just over 4 million kilometres (2.5 million miles) of Earth. That would make it about 10 times farther away than the moon, which is considered close by cosmic standards.

American astronomer Eleanor Helin was the first to spot Nereus in 1982. Unfortunately, she won’t be around next week to see her discovery make a closer call. She died in 2009.

NASA classifies anything passing within 120 million miles of Earth as a Near-Earth Object (NEO). Scientists track thousands of NEOs to determine how likely they are to collide with Earth, NASA has an entire table of them.

According to Forbes, Nereus has been recommended as a target for many space missions due to its egg form, size, and orbital route around the sun, which makes it an ideal asteroid to visit.

Additionally, this asteroid could also be a stellar candidate for mining. Asterank, a database that monitors more than 600,000 asteroids, values Nereus at US$4.71 billion (S$6.43 billion) making it one of the most cost-effective asteroids to mine for minerals. Nereus is estimated to contain billions of tons of nickel, iron, and cobalt. /TISG