Flying Over Asteroid Eros West End

The robot spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker continues to orbit asteroid Eros. This condensed 40-minute long time-lapse sequence taken last month shows what it looks like to pass within 200 kilometers of Eros ' west end. The north pole of the rotating mountain is toward the bottom of the picture. This month NEAR-Shoemaker closes to within 100 kilometers, and by the end of this month will orbit only 50 kilometers from the center of this 33-kilometer long asteroid . One reason for moving in so close is to determine if 433 Eros has a magnetic field . NEAR Shoemaker, launched in 1996, is run by a computer similar to a PC released 15 years ago (12 MHz, 256K).