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Inside Eros' Large Crater

June 10, 2000
This image of asteroid Eros, taken by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker on June 6, 2000, shows a view from the edge of the large, 5.3-kilometer (3.3-mile) diameter crater, looking into its depths.

NEAR Shoemaker continues to take pictures of Eros under different lighting conditions and at better spatial resolution. This approach maximizes the amount of recognizable detail in the surface, while placing that detail into the context of the asteroidís large-scale geography. This image approximates the view from the edge of the large, 5.3-kilometer (3.3-mile) diameter crater, looking into its depths. It was acquired on June 6, 2000, from an orbital altitude of 49 kilometers (30 miles). The whole scene is 1.4 kilometers (0.9 miles) across.

Built and managed by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, NEAR was the first spacecraft launched in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, small-scale planetary missions. See the NEAR web page at http://near.jhuapl.edu/ for more details.

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