In the Solar System · tracked live
Eros
A near-Earth asteroid the shape of a peanut, here because NEAR Shoemaker orbited it for a year and then, in February 2001, landed on it - the first spacecraft to orbit a small body and the first to touch one, on a mission that had no landing legs and was never designed to. Its orbit crosses Mars's and comes inside 22 million km of ours, which is what made it reachable and what makes it worth watching.
- Radius
- 8 km
- Around the equator
- 53 km
- From the Sun
- 256,058,734 km (+251,908 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 332,460,494 km (+1,337,832 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 18 min
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.