In a Valentine's Day tryst 160 million miles from Earth, NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft began the first-ever orbit of an asteroid.
Until now, scientists could do little but gaze from afar at asteroid 433 Eros, named for the Greek god of love. But thanks to efforts of the Cornell-led imaging team, Eros is now revealed in close-up as a cratered, potato-shaped object. "We now have the pictures to prove it," said Joseph Veverka, Cornell professor of astronomy, at a televised NASA press conference Feb. 14 at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md., following NEAR's success.
With new images from NEAR arriving this week, said Veverka, "It's like Christmas for us now, we're tearing open the presents."
One of the early, up-close images shows a very large crater, about three miles in diameter, on the 20-mile-long asteroid's sunlit surface.
Veverka is leading the mission's science team in charge of the visible light camera and near-infrared spectrometer, two of the five science instruments carried by NEAR. His operations team also designed the spacecraft command sequences that point and operate the instruments. Other members of the Cornell team include James Bell, assistant professor of astronomy, and researchers Peter Thomas, Beth Clark and Colin Peterson.
The scientists had to overcome a December 1998 near-miss when rocket boosters failed. But quick thinking by Cornell, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and APL programmers sent signals to NEAR with minutes to spare, telling the craft to snap images on an unplanned flyby.
A new problem is that the lens on NEAR's camera has become slightly smudged from the booster rocket exhaust, with no way to clean it. But Veverka said his imaging team has figured how to work around the smudge. "It's like when you wear glasses, you can still see through them even if the lens is a little dirty. Our scheme of removing [the smudges] from the images is OK in black and white."
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