Eros (asteroid)

The asteroid 433 Eros was named after the Greek god of love Eros. It is an S-type asteroid approximately 13 × 13 × 33 km in size, the second-largest near-Earth asteroid.

It was visited by the NEAR Shoemaker probe, which first orbited it taking extensive photographs of its surface and then in 2001 at the end of its mission was landed on the asteroid's surface using only its maneuvering jets.

Depending on where they stood on Eros, a person who weighed 200 pounds (90 kilograms) on Earth would weigh about two ounces on the asteroid. A rock tossed from the asteroid's surface at 22 miles an hour could escape into space. A basketball player with a 36-inch vertical leap could jump about a mile on Eros and risk putting himself in orbit.

Surface gravity depends on the distance from a spot on the surface to the center of a body's mass. The surface gravity on Eros varies a lot, since it is not a sphere but an elongated peanut-shaped (or potato-shaped, or shoe-shaped) object. The daytime temperature on Eros at about 100°C and nighttime measurements at -150°C. Eros's density is 2.4 g/cm³, about the same as the density of Earth's crust. It rotates once every 5.27 hours.

NEAR scientists have found that most of the larger rocks strewn across Eros were ejected from a single crater in a meteorite collision perhaps a billion years ago.

External addresses

• NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft
• Movie: NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft landing

Referenced By