39 Years Closer to Earth
First discovered in 1982, Nereus, which also orbits the sun for 1.82 years, makes it close to Earth almost every 10 years.
Because Nereus frequently visits this region of our Solar System, NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA once considered collecting samples from it using JAXA’s Hayabusa spacecraft, but they ended up choosing a different asteroid (25143 Itokawa).
NASA projects that Nereus will make another close pass to Earth on March 2, 2031 and November 2050.
But an even closer visit is expected on February 14, 2060. By then Nereus may be within about 0.74 million miles (1.2 million km) from Earth.
The event will place the space rock in a position three times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Because of this, NASA plans to deploy robots to observe Nereus in the future.
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