They are shaped something like a Wildcat football! We passed a piece of a real one around in class!! One killed off the dinosaurs!!!!
The asteroids pages at LANL, SEDS, JPL, and NSSDC.
Asteroid collisions with the Earth, and meteorites (pieces of asteroids that have landed on the Earth) are discussed on the meteorites page.
The NEAR mission was successfully launched 1996 Feb 17, and explored several asteroids over the following four years. It became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid when it arrived at Eros in 1999, and was the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. Johns Hopkins built it, and NASA's NSSDC has another page on it. NEAR took the picture at the left below. The other two asteroids were photographed by the Galileo spacecraft.
