Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for St. Valentine’s Day, Thursday, February 14th.  The sun will rise at 7:43.  It’ll be up for 10 hours and 26 minutes, setting at 6:10.   The moon, 3 days before first quarter, will set at 11:27 this evening.

On Valentine’s day 2000 a spacecraft named NEAR for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous slipped into orbit of the asteroid named after the Greek god of love Eros.  It is a banana shaped asteroid.  NEAR had failed in its first attempt to approach the asteroid, so the date was purely a coincidence of orbital mechanics.  This was the first ever orbiting of a spacecraft about an asteroid.  Eros proved to be a treasure trove of information.  Eros is about 21 by 10 miles in size and roughly rotating end over end in a 5 hour period.  At the end of a year long mission the satellite was commanded to land on the center part of Eros that was rotating the least.  It survived the landing and operated for 16 days.  The spacecraft has since been renamed NEAR-Shoemaker after the late Eugene Shoemaker.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Eugene Shoemaker is famous in planetary circles of among other things Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fame (The comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994).

Six views of asteroid 433-Eros in February 2000. Images from NASA’s NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft.