NONE AT THE MOMENT, SORRY....

Asteroids are small fragments of rock, not large enough to be classified as Planets, left over from when the Solar System was formed which was about 4,500 million years ago.  About 2,500 of these have now been catalogued and they range wildly in size from just metres in diameter to hundreds of kilometres wide - although only about 250 have diameters of over 100km, most tend to be about 1km across.  There are about 16 main ones, the largest being Ceres (940 km diameter).  92.8% of all the asteroids examined were found to be made of stone whilst 5.7% were (and probably still are) made from a mixture of Nickel and Iron.   Also, they tend to have irregular shapes, like pebbles and some of them actually have their own little moons!

Most asteroids in the Solar System are to be found in the Asteroid Belt (or Main Belt) which is in an elliptical orbit round the Sun, between Mars and Jupiter about 2.2 to 3.3 AUs from the Sun.  However, they don't all stay there, in fact some are to be found inside Earth's own orbit. Some even hit the Earth in the past.  Quite a few also get knocked out of the belt.  All it takes is for one to hit another one, perhaps on the edge at high speed to send it skimming out into space.  This is potentially quite dangerous if a big one happened to hit Earth (one theory suggests that the dinosaurs were wiped out when an asteroid or comet hit the Earth near the Yucatan peninsula).

There have been many theories as to how asteroids originated  but the most likely one is that they are left-overs from when the Solar System was created.  Originally, there were probably about eight Mars sized objects in the main belt, but it is thought that Jupiter's gravitational influenced slowly caused them to fragment. One of these objects probably crashed into the Earth creating the moon (this is known as the 'Big Splash', see the Earth section for more details), another one must have survived and is now called Mars and the rest got broken up in collisions, with most of the debris now scattered around the Solar System or burned in the Sun and the rest in the Asteroid Belt.

The NEAR  (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) spacecraft was launched in 1996 too examine a certain asteroid called Eros -number 433- (which is not actually part of the Main Belt) and on its way, it passed asteroid Matilde by just 1,200 km.  The NEAR mission has successfully completed all its aims and has landed on the surface of Eros.  For loads of unprecedented pictures of this asteroid, including some as close as a few miles, go to the NEAR website.