near_stitchedpics_010228 The NASA probe that stunned space fans this month by
landing on an asteroid returned more than 100,000 closeups during its 363-day sojourn around the object, including dozens from its pre-landing approach.Members of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Shoemaker team at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University released a subset of those
images at the mission's Web site. Meanwhile Douglas Ellison, a Multimedia Design student at DeMontfort University in Leicester, England, U.K., recently took the time to combine a number of the approach images to produce revealing composites of the surface of Asteroid 433 Eros. "Following the fairly sparse release of images of the NEAR Shoemaker descent, I downloaded the raw image data from the NEAR data archive and stitched these images together," he wrote in a recent email to SPACE.com.
Ellison, 22, created this image of Eros using data from NEAR's Feb. 12, 2001 descent to the asteroid's surface. This image shows features as imaged by the probe about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the surface.
Next page: an Eros skyline image
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Ellison "stitched" together this skyline image of Eros using shots taken by NEAR during its Feb. 12, 2001 descent to the asteroid's surface when the probe was about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the surface.
Next page: Eros from 3 kilometers to 1,000 meters
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Finally, Ellison combined images taken of Eros during NEAR's Feb. 12, 2001 descent to the asteroid's surface when the probe was at altitudes ranging from 1.9 miles to 3,280 feet (3 kilometers to 1,000 meters).
Ellison's main space interest is Mars missions, a focus that was sparked during the Pathfinder landing in 1997 on the Red Planet. The Pathfinder images posted online inspired him to improve upon the NEAR Shoemaker images of Eros.
"Once the descent data had been released, and still nothing new from the NEAR team, I'd thought I'd have a go at taking some of the images just to try and give a 'being there' feel to it!" Ellison said. "We all remember the stunning Pathfinder images -- and whilst Eros isn't as visually complex or immersive, it's somewhere we've not been before and something we've not tried before. All in all, a good excuse to spend a few hours playing with some data and see what I could produce!"
The highly successful NEAR Shoemaker mission concluded on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2001.
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