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Eros March Movie Marathon, Part 4
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On March 15, 2000, the imager on the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft acquired a series of four movies showing different parts of Eros from an altitude of 204 kilometers (127 miles). Each part of the asteroid was captured under changing lighting conditions to bring out details in surface morphology. This fourth movie shows the region wrapping west from the edge of the 5.5-kilometer (3.4-mile) diameter crater, which dominates one hemisphere, to the middle of the saddle that dominates the opposite hemisphere. This part of Eros exhibits a conspicuous "fabric" of aligned east-west oriented troughs. As the saddle rotates into view, lighting changes cause a dramatic change in appearance of its interior structures. When the saddle enters the frame at the upper left, the shadows caused by oblique lighting accentuate several low, curved ridges. As the Sun moves over these structures, however, they appear as subdued gray bands. The Universal Time (UT) of acquisition of each image and the corresponding sub-spacecraft latitude and longitude on Eros are indicated at the bottom of the frame. (Images 0128523384-0128529720)
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Built and managed by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel,
Maryland, NEAR-Shoemaker was the first spacecraft launched in NASA's Discovery Program
of low-cost, small-scale planetary missions. See the
NEAR web site for more details.
Feedback to Scott Murchie at APL.