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Once upon an asteroid

Nature volume 413, pages 369–370 (2001)Cite this article

When the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft landed on the asteroid Eros earlier this year, it provided an unprecedented view of these battered relics from the early Solar System. The next step is to find out what's inside.

Planetary formation began as delicate sedimentation, with granules clinging to other granules in the solar nebula1. It climaxed 10 million to 100 million years later with planets smashing together at tens of kilometres per second2. The Moon, for instance, was created when a body the size of Mars hit the early Earth about 4.5 billion years ago3,4. In between was a fast-paced epoch, as poorly comprehended as it was brief, which we try to understand by studying asteroids and comets — remnants that wander the Solar System like ghosts from a bygone time. One such ghost is 433 Eros, and papers beginning on page 390 of this issue5,6,7 describe the scientific results from the controlled descent of NASA's NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft onto this asteroid last February.

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Figure 1

NASA/JHUAPL

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  1. the Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, California, USA

    Erik Asphaug

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  1. Erik Asphaug
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Correspondence to Erik Asphaug.

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Asphaug, E. Once upon an asteroid. Nature 413, 369–370 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35096660

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