Asteroid Eros from NEAR Shoemaker. Photo: JHU/APL

On March 7, the imager on the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft acquired the first of several planned "flyover movies" of Eros. This one shows the "saddle" region from a range of 205 kilometers (127 miles). Watch the movie.

A flyover's purpose is to show a region of the asteroid during continually changing lighting conditions, with solar illumination coming from a variety of directions and elevations above the surface. With the Sun in different positions, features with different orientations become more evident. Also, with the Sun low to the surface, brightness variations are dominated by the shadows cast by landforms. In contrast, with the Sun high in the sky, brightness differences are dominated by the intrinsic differences in reflectivity of the surface materials. The combination of illuminations maximizes the ability to characterize landforms and to separate the effects of topography from differences in reflectivity.

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.