The robot spacecraft, called NEAR for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, went into orbit around Eros on Feb. 14 for a one-year mission to study one of these primordial bodies in unprecedented detail.
The Greek myth of Psyche and Eros is one of the most instructive narratives to shed consistent light on the feminine nature.
Eros is one of the larger asteroids, measuring about 21 miles long and 8 miles thick.
There is a small possibility that Eros could one day strike Earth, scientists say, but that danger would not arise for another 1.5 million years.
Interestingly, he does not, in Beware of Pity, allude to, or make any real use of, the atmosphere of stifling sexual repression that animates "Eros Matutinus", one of the best chapters of The World of Yesterday, in which Zweig acknowledges there were some very significant aspects of genteel society the world was right to discard.
He said the touchdown on Eros, which has one-thousandth the gravity of Earth, was probably gentler than landings on the moon, Venus and Mars by craft built for such a task.
NEAR Shoemaker, the first craft to orbit an asteroid, also became the first to land on one when it touched down on Eros after circling it for a year.
One of the devices, called Eros (Eros-therapy.com), is a cup that fits over the genitals.
Of course, eros was just one of around 30 different types of love with which the ancient Greeks were familiar.
Dr. Joseph Veverka of Cornell University, head of the mission's imaging team, said the spacecraft took more than 80 pictures on the way to its landing near one of Eros's most distinct features, a saddle-shaped depression called Himeros.
