Scientists have released a 90-second movie showing the close-up glance NEAR Shoemaker stole last month of 433 Eros, the asteroid that has held the spacecraft in its orbital embrace since Valentines Day.

The space short covers portions of a 55-minute span of the October 25-26 flyby, during which the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker spacecraft dropped to within 5 miles (8 kilometers) of the surface of Eros.

"We basically flew over the surface at half the height you fly in a commercial jet," said Mark Robinson, a NEAR science team member and member of the geological sciences faculty at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.

The robotic probe came as close as 3 miles (5.3 kilometers) of the surface during the encounter the closest any spacecraft has ever come to a planetary body without landing.

"We really saw the details when we got down low," said Scott Murchie, a member of the imaging team at Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Maryland, which built and manages the NEAR spacecraft mission. "That jump in resolution really brings things into focus, both literally and figuratively."

NEAR buzzed Eros while passing by at just 14 miles per hour (6 meters per second), allowing it to snap nearly 300 digital images. Seventy-four of those images taken at intervals ranging from 75 to 25 seconds were then stitched together to make the film. Boasting a resolution of roughly 3.3 feet (1 meter) per pixel, the images are probably the finest ever taken by a spacecraft orbiting an extraterrestrial planetary body.

"The resolution in these images is about three times better than any we've seen of Eros, and they've given us a lot to talk about," NEAR Project Scientist Andrew Cheng.

The clip reveals Eros surface in exquisite detail as NEAR skimmed over the 21-mile (33-kilometer) asteroid. Battered during a lifetime measured in the billions of years, Eros appears soft and muted in the images, its edges worn.

"Think of it as slow-motion sandblasting," Robinson said.

Dust fills crater bottoms and piles up high around rocks the size of small office buildings. Jagged boulders lie nearby others that are smooth, pointing to a complex evolutionary history dominated by the impact of objects on the asteroid, and how the resulting ejecta responded to the low-gravity environment.

The planetary pan is but the latest but by far the highest resolution yet of a handful of films released during the course of the mission.

"The resolution in these images is about three times better than any we've seen of Eros, and they've given us a lot to talk about," NEAR Project Scientist Andrew Cheng said in a statement. "There is an amazing number and variety of boulders, some of which seem to have a layered structure. We also see the same global fabric of ridges and grooves that we saw from higher altitudes, and from this altitude we can discern finer details."

More images and clips will be released, scientists said, in conjunction with a forthcoming paper in the journal Science.

Since the flyover, the car-sized NEAR probe has retreated to a higher orbit, where it continues to gather global images of Eros from about 124 miles (200 kilometers) away.

After starting a 22-mile (35-kilometer) orbit on December 13, NEAR Shoemaker will operate at that distance or lower until the mission ends.

On February 12, the mission team aims to lower NEAR toward Eros in what is euphemistically called a "controlled descent," but what will really be a gentle crash-landing. Imaging experts hope NEAR will capture views of Eros during the approach that will be perhaps 10 times better than what has been seen so far during the year the probe has orbited the asteroid.

Because the camera is essentially a telescope, pictures of Eros surface will become blurred as NEAR moves closer and closer to a landing.