PIA03136: Lowest Altitude Diversity


Lowest Altitude Diversity

Caption:

NEAR Shoemaker took this picture at 8:45 p.m. EST on January 25, 2001, during one of the spacecraft's low-altitude passes over the surface of Eros. The distance to the center of the picture is only 9 kilometers (5.6 miles), so the entire scene is a mere 340 meters (1,120 feet) across. At this scale, we can distinguish features less than 2 meters across. The asteroid's surface appears nearly devoid of obvious craters and is instead dominated by small boulders. In the upper left part of the image, a smooth deposit with a lower density of boulders is in contrast to the very rough-textured material seen at the lower right.

Background Info:

Built and managed by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, NEAR was the first spacecraft launched in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, small-scale planetary missions. See the NEAR web page at http://near.jhuapl.edu/ for more details.

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target 433 Eros
System Near Earth Objects
Target Type Asteroid
Mission NEAR Shoemaker
Instrument Host NEAR Shoemaker
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI)
Detector
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2001-02-17
Date in Caption 2001-01-25
Image Credit NASA/JPL/JHUAPL
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03136
Identifier PIA03136