selected
The NASA space probe NEAR Shoemaker touched down on Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.
Related Wikipedia articles
NASA
American space and aeronautics agency
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the United States's civil space program, aeronautics research and space research. Established in 1958, it succeeded the National Advisory Committee for…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
NEAR Shoemaker
American space probe to asteroid (1996–2001)
Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker, renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
433 Eros
Near-Earth asteroid
433 Eros is a stony asteroid of the Amor group, and the first discovered, and second-largest near-Earth object. It has an elongated shape and a volume-equivalent diameter of approximately 16.8 kilometers. Visited by the NEAR Shoemaker space probe in 1998, it became the first…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Asteroid
Minor planets found within the inner Solar System
An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter. Asteroids are rocky, metallic, or icy bodies with no atmosphere, and are broadly classified…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)