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© Copyright 2002 – 2009
Michael Edward McNeil
Impearls: Fourth NEAR Eros orbital anniversary
Item page — this may be a chapter or subsection of a larger work. Click on link to access entire piece.
Earthdate 2004-02-14
Four years ago today — appropriately on Valentine's Day of the year 2000 — the NEAR-Shoemaker (NEAR for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) spacecraft slid into orbit about the asteroid 433 Eros.
The remarkable 780-frame sequence of photographs shown at left, forming a movie of Eros' stunning end-over-end rotation, was shot on 2000-02-12 (shortly before orbital insertion) at the rate of one frame every 26 seconds.
Following, and indeed preceding, arrival in Eros orbit, NEAR-Shoemaker gave the spinning mountain terrific camera coverage, providing us with close-up views of a near-Earth approaching asteroid such as we'd never seen before.
After a year of this, on 2001-02-12, the spacecraft — though never designed for any sort of landing — was commanded to settle down onto the surface of the asteroid Eros, continuing in radio contact with Earth all the while.
It sits there to this day.
Kudos to the NEAR team!
1
UPDATE:
2004-02-24 02:00 UT:
Asteroid 433 Eros forms a 34 × 11 × 11 km (21 × 7 × 7 mile) rough cylinder, incorporating a volume of 2,503 km3 and area of 1,106 km2.
This surface area is a little larger than, say, the city of Moscow, the Dead Sea, Tahiti, or King Island in Australia, a bit smaller than Lake Champlain, Okinawa, Impearls' own Santa Cruz County in California, or the city (not county) of Los Angeles.
The rotation period (day) of Eros is 5.27 hours.
The range of surface-normal gravitational accelerations is 2.1 to 5.5 mm/s2, while the range of escape speeds is 3.1 to 17.2 m/s.
2
1 Follow this link or the one on the image above to a page with larger-scale versions of the animation. Don't miss this page of all the NEAR Eros animations, while the main NEAR page can be found here. The NEAR site's Image of the Day Archive is a particularly nice browse.
2 D. K. Yeomans, P. G. Antreasian, J.-P. Barriot, S. R. Chesley, D. W. Dunham, R. W. Farquhar, J. D. Giorgini, C. E. Helfrich, A. S. Konopliv, J. V. McAdams, J. K. Miller, W. M. Owen Jr., D. J. Scheeres, P. C. Thomas, J. Veverka, and B. G. Williams, “Radio Science Results During the NEAR-Shoemaker Spacecraft Rendezvous with Eros,” Science, Vol. 289, No. 5487 (Issue 2000-09-22), pp. 2085-2088. Requires subscription or pay-per-view.
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