Word: asteroidal
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...minutes apart a few nights earlier, a bright dot with a small tail stood out starkly against the background of fixed stars. "I was extremely excited, heart pounding and all that stuff," says Spahr, a graduate student from the University of Florida who was surveying the skies for undiscovered asteroids. He immediately shot and developed a second set of photos, and was shocked to see that in just two days the dot had doubled in size and speed. To Spahr, it seemed apparent that a large asteroid was barreling toward Earth...
DEEP IN INTERPLANETARY SPACE, AN irregularly shaped chunk of rock about twice as long as the island of Manhattan is silently speeding along the orbit it has traced for billions of years. It is an asteroid known as 433 Eros, and it is just one of thousands that have been discovered since the first was spotted in 1801. Astronomers believe these mysterious objects are rubble left over from the formation of the solar system and that they've occasionally smashed into Earth; it may well have been a wayward asteroid, for example, that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years...
...launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a trajectory that will carry it to within 20 miles of Eros, where it will remain in orbit for a year of intensive study. The mission should give astronomers important clues to the formation of the planets and the origin of asteroids. Just as significant, however, it should demonstrate that NASA has started to change its bloated, bureaucratic ways. Although this is one of the trickiest space missions ever, it's also one of the cheapest. The Galileo probe, now in orbit around Jupiter, cost $1.6 billion and took nearly a decade, while...
Despite its low cost, NEAR is bristling with sensors. It carries not only a camera but also a laser-based radar system to map Eros' surface in detail, three different spectrometers to analyze the asteroid's chemical composition, and a magnetometer to gauge its magnetic field. The ship itself is an instrument of sorts. On its first approach, NEAR will deliberately overshoot Eros to see how much the asteroid's gravity slows it down and thus how massive Eros really...
...core under gravity, while lighter rock stays closer to the surface. A very dense or a relatively light Eros would suggest that it was once part of a larger body that was later destroyed, a well-preserved relic of the solar system's violent youth. Says Zuber: "An asteroid is essentially a snapshot of the planetary-formation process...