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The Long View of Eros This image looking down the length of Eros was taken from the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on March 10, 2000, from a range of 206 kilometers (127 miles). At once, it shows many of the landforms revealed in the last month to be characteristic of this tiny world. The part of the surface shown here is covered by craters of all sizes, right down to the limit of image resolution. Many of the largest craters, such as the two at upper left, have conspicuous brightness ("albedo") markings on their interior walls. At the upper left is a portion of the ridge that nearly wraps around Eros' waist. Near the center of the image, oriented from the upper right to lower left, are several broad troughs, or grooves, about 200 meters (656 feet) wide. The three boulders on the far horizon are about 80 meters (262 feet) across - each nearly the size of a football field.
The area shown in the image is 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) high. To put the asteroid's size into human perspective, a famous New York landmark is shown inset at the lower left.
(Image 0128058662)
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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. Feedback to Scott Murchie. Scott.Murchie@jhuapl.edu.