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![]() Looking into asteroid Eros' saddle wall JHU/APL RELEASE Posted: May 11, 2000
The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft captured this image of the inside of the saddle on May 5, 2000, from an orbital altitude of 52 kilometers (32 miles). The whole scene is about 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) across, and the image shows features as small as 4 meters (13 feet) across. The bright feature running from the top to the bottom of the image is a steep, Sun-facing slope. In some places it appears to be an escarpment, while near the center of the image it appears as an inside wall of a 200-meter (656-foot) wide trough. The boulder in the upper right of the image is nearly 40 meters (131 feet) across. 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.
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