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Bright Crater Wall

Feb. 17, 2001
This image of asteroid Eros, taken by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker on Jan. 11, 2001, shows material on the inner wall of a crater, brighter than the surrounding regolith and is thought to be subsurface material exposed when overlying, darker regolith slides off.

NEAR Shoemaker captured this image on January 11, 2001, while orbiting 38 kilometers (24 miles) above Eros. Material on the inner wall of the crater in the center of the image is brighter than the surrounding regolith and is thought to be subsurface material exposed when overlying, darker regolith slides off. The whole scene is about 1.2 kilometers (0.7 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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