History
As one of the larger near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), Eros has played a significant role in history. It was discovered on the same night (13 August 1898) by Gustav Witt in Berlin and Auguste Charlois at Nice. Witt was taking a 2-hour exposure of Beta Aquarii to secure astrometric positions of asteroid 185 Eunike.
During the opposition of 1900–1901, a worldwide program was launched to make parallax measurements of the asteroid to determine the solar parallax (or distance to the sun), with the results published in 1910 by Arthur Hinks of Cambridge. A similar program was then carried out, during a closer approach, in 1930–1931 by Harold Spencer Jones. The value obtained by this program was considered definitive until 1968, when greater faith was placed in radar and dynamical parallax methods.
Eros was one of the first asteroids to be visited by a spacecraft, and the first to be orbited and soft-landed on. NASA spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around Eros in 2000, and came to rest on its surface in 2001.
Read more about this topic: 433 Eros
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