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Peeking Into the Sunlight

July 6, 2000
This image of asteroid Eros, taken by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker on June 20, 2000, shows four particularly large rocks whose tops protrude out from the shadowed crater interior and into sunlight.

NEAR Shoemaker images have shown many large boulders on Eros' surface, but seldom are the boulders as big and as close as the ones in this image taken on June 20, 2000, from an altitude of 51 kilometers (32 miles). Nestled within the 700-meter (2300-foot) diameter crater at the center of the picture are four particularly large rocks whose tops protrude out from the shadowed crater interior and into sunlight. The center boulder, the largest, is about 100 meters (330 feet) across. The whole scene is approximately 1.9 kilometers (1.2 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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