Home > Asteroid, Ephemeris Program, NASA, Near Earth Object > Ephemeris: 02/14/2025 – A Valentine’s Day Rendezvous

Ephemeris: 02/14/2025 – A Valentine’s Day Rendezvous

February 14, 2025
The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, photographed by GTAS member Daniel Dall’Olmo. Today’s topic is also related to Valentine’s Day: an asteroid named for the god of love and the spacecraft that kissed it.

This is Ephemeris for St Valentine’s Day, Friday, February 14th. Today the Sun will be up for 10 hours and 26 minutes, setting at 6:10, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:42. The Moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 8:34 this evening.

Twenty-five years ago to the day, the NEAR-Shoemaker* spacecraft entered into orbit of the near Earth asteroid 433 Eros. It wasn’t originally planned to enter orbit of the asteroid named after the Greek god of love on Valentine’s Day, 2000. It arose after an aborted course correction a year earlier. After solving the problem, a new course was plotted and NEAR-Shoemaker was gently inserted into orbit of this 21 mile long asteroid, shaped like a bent bread stick with a bite taken out of the center of it. The spacecraft spent almost a year orbiting Eros at various altitudes. The spacecraft ended its mission by gently dropping onto the middle of the asteroid, where it stayed alive for ten days before succumbing to the cold.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT – 5 hours). Times will be different for other locations.

* The spacecraft was launched as NEAR for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. It was renamed en route NEAR-Shoemaker after Eugene Shoemaker’s death in 1997. Shoemaker was a geologist who trained Apollo astronauts and proved that the Barringer Meteor Crater was indeed an impact site and not a volcanic caldera, and that most of the Moon’s craters were also caused by impacts. He with his wife Carolyn and David Levy discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which crashed into Jupiter in 22 pieces in July 1994, gaining worldwide attention.

Addendum

Six views of Eros as it tumbled
“These color images of Eros were taken by the NEAR probe on February 12, 2000, at a distance of 1,800 kilometers, during the final approach imaging sequence before insertion into orbit. The images show the approximate color of Eros as it would be seen with the naked eye.” Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Credit
NASA/JPL/JHUAPL. Caption from: https://eros2019.imcce.fr/eros.html via Google Translate.
An Artist’s rendition of the Near-Shoemeker spacecraft resting on the surface of 433 Eros. Credit Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

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