Lowest Altitude Diversity

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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.

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