NEAR image of the day for 2000 Apr 07

The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft makes thousands of observations of Eros that all began as concepts, or ideas from mission scientists. Sequence planners take these abstract ideas and turn them into commands that control the spacecraft and instruments second by second. They work closely with the NEAR team's scientists, mission operators, and celestial navigators to assure that all these commands are within NEAR Shoemaker's operating constraints. These constraints include maintaining a spacecraft attitude in which the solar panels generate sufficient power, and seeing that data is kept to a volume that can be transmitted to the ground within the time allocated by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).

The sequence planners use sophisticated computer programs to provide visualizations of the science observations. The simulation above shows an image mosaic in the planning stages, depicting what the science team would see in an image taken March 17, 2000. The computer-generated Eros is "painted" with the shading expected to be seen from the spacecraft's vantage point, while the planned positions of images are shown in light blue. The red, green, and dark blue lines - parts of the asteroid's principal axes - are shown as reference points.