433 Eros — The First Near-Earth Asteroid — to Fly Past Earth This Weekend

On Sunday, 30 November 2025, 433 Eros, the first near-Earth asteroid ever discovered, will make a relatively close but perfectly safe flyby of our planet. It’s expected to pass at about 60 million kilometers (~37.2 million miles), or around 0.4 astronomical units — close enough that amateur skywatchers with modest telescopes may have a chance to spot it.

📍 Why Eros Matters

• Eros was discovered on 13 August 1898 by astronomers at the Urania Observatory in Berlin (credited to Carl Gustav Witt and assistant Felix Linke), and independently the same day by Auguste Charlois at the Nice Observatory in France.
• It is a stony (S-type) asteroid belonging to the Amor group: its orbit lies between Mars and Earth, occasionally crossing Mars’s path but not quite reaching Earth’s orbit.
• Physically, Eros is elongated and irregularly shaped — roughly 34 × 11 × 11 km (about 21 × 6.8 × 6.8 miles).

🚀 A History of Exploration

The rocky body earned its place in space-exploration history when the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft visited it:

• NEAR first flew by Eros on 23 December 1998 at a distance of only ~3,800 km (2,400 miles).
• On 14 February 2000, NEAR entered orbit around the asteroid — the first time humanity orbited an asteroid.
• Then, on 12 February 2001, the probe successfully landed on Eros — the first successful landing on an asteroid. Remarkably, despite expectations of destruction, the spacecraft survived and conducted the first gamma-ray experiments on a body other than Earth.

These observations taught scientists much about Eros’s shape, composition, density (similar to Earth’s crust), craters, ridges — enriching our understanding of near-Earth objects.

🔭 How to Observe the 2025 Flyby

• Because of its size and relatively close approach, Eros should be visible for several weeks after its closest pass — even with a small amateur telescope (≈ 60 mm).
• The asteroid will appear in a region just a few degrees from the core of the Andromeda Galaxy — a helpful reference for stargazers.
• If you can’t observe it in person, you can tune into a live-stream of the flyby courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project and the Asteroid Foundation — scheduled for 30 November 2025 at 20:00 UTC.

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