The photo album of “NEAR’s trip to Eros” has a new page: the first image from the spacecraft’s approach to the asteroid. Taken January 12, with NEAR’s
Multispectral Imager, the picture was posted today on the NEAR Web site.
More photos will follow in the weeks leading up to NEAR’s Feb. 14
rendezvous with Eros.
Snapped from 45,350 kilometers (27,200 miles) away, Eros appears only
as a white speck on the black background of deep space. However, mission
navigators use these early images to confirm the asteroid’s location and
keep the spacecraft on the right course. At the time this image of Eros was taken by NEAR, the spacecraft was million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth.
The NEAR team also uses them to measure variations in the light reflected off Eros, a key to determining the asteroid’s exact rotation.
NEAR is now about 22,500 miles (or 35,300 kilometers) from its target —
closer than the distance at which most weather and communications
satellites orbit the Earth. The spacecraft is approaching Eros at a relative speed to the asteroid of 80 kilometers a second (43 mph or 19 meters per second).
Eros is a very elongated object about 33 by 13 by 13 kilometers (21 by 8
by 8 miles) in size. In this view the asteroid is illuminated by the Sun from the right.
During the next month NEAR will continue to approach Eros at a low velocity, and the asteroid will appear progressively larger in images returned from the spacecraft.
On February 14 NEAR will fire its thrusters and begin to orbit Eros, becoming the first artificial satellite of any asteroid.
