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The NEAR spacecraft has mapped the asteroid Eros entirely.
By
Senior Space Writer
posted: 12:10 pm ET
07 July 2000
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ASTEROID EROS WASHINGTON -- A Kodak moment for sure, but millions of miles from Earth.The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous ( NEAR) spacecraft has reached a photographic high point in its mapping mission of asteroid Eros. The NASA probe has snapped digital images of the giant shoe-shaped world, from heel to toe."We do have the whole globe covered now. We have all the images," said Louise Prockter, member of the NEAR imaging team at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Maryland. 
Craters on Eros contain boulders of various sizes. APL built the NEAR -- renamed NEAR-Shoemaker after the late space geologist, Gene Shoemaker -- and is also managing the mission for NASA. The spacecraft is 74 million miles (118 million kilometers) from Earth. The spacecraft began orbiting Eros on February 14.So far, about 65,000 images have been taken of Eros, Prockter said. The challenge ahead is piecing together the pictures to create a global mosaic of Eros, she said. "It's not like getting your holiday snaps out," Prockter told SPACE.com. "Eros is probably going to be the best-imaged body in the solar system, I would imagine," she said. The lighting and geometry in the pictures will be tweaked -- compensating for the varying shape of the asteroid -- to create a seamless mosaic. Puzzle pieces Images taken of Eros' south pole were the last pieces of the global puzzle to fall into place. The sun is now illuminating the southern regions that were shadowed through the first months of the spacecraft's mission.
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