Between the red Mars and the giant Jupiter orbit, there is an asteroid belt composed of hundreds of thousands of asteroids. These asteroids are actually a group of rubble of different sizes. The largest diameter can reach Qian Qian meters, and the smallest is only a few meters or dozens of meters. Like the eight planets, these asteroids revolve around the sun day and night. How did these mysterious asteroids form? What cosmic information do they contain? These problems have always attracted the attention of scientists. Visiting asteroids has also become one of the important purposes of scientists' space exploration.

On 2001February 12, the unmanned probe of "Near-Earth Asteroid Dating" in the United States successfully landed on the asteroid Cupid for one year, thus realizing the first encounter between the probe and the asteroid in human history.

The asteroid named after the ancient Greek eros is a very common one in the asteroid family. It is actually a big stone, shaped like a potato, 34 kilometers long, 13 kilometers wide and 14 kilometers thick, about 3160,000 kilometers away from the earth. The asteroid Cupid also orbits the sun, but its gravity is only one thousandth of that of the earth. It is conceivable that the accuracy of landing on such an asteroid with minimal gravity is so high that the experts in charge of this exploration have not made a plan to land on the asteroid.

The unmanned probe "Near-Earth Asteroid Dating" was launched by the United States in February 1996. After four years of space flight, it successfully entered the orbit of the asteroid "Eros" on February 14, 2000, and began to detect it. In less than a year, the detector has sent back about 6.5438+600,000 photos of the asteroid rock surface.

This probe has been running in an orbit 24 kilometers away from Eros for nearly a year, and its fuel has been gradually exhausted. At this time, it finally made an amazing move: it launched the final sprint to the "God of Love" star that it "paid attention to" for a year. After two rocket launches, the probe left the orbit of Eros, slowly landed on its surface, and finally landed on the barren and rugged star surface of Eros. The whole process lasted four and a half hours. Scientists are even more delighted that this is a "scientific dividend"; In addition, the landing site is also an area that scientists are most interested in: there is a lack of craters, but there are a lot of rocks and ditch marks.

"Near-Earth asteroid dating" is one of the first probes with robot function developed by NASA. After analyzing the photos it sent back, scientists pointed out that "Eros" contains the most primitive substances in the solar system, and measured the density, chemical composition and magnetic field of asteroids. The successful landing did not damage the equipment on the probe, so that the probe could continue to send signals to the earth within three months to further understand the mystery of the asteroid. With the mystery of asteroids uncovered, human beings will have a clearer understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system and even the evolution of the universe.