NEAR Shoemaker took the four images in this mosaic on September 9, 2000, from an altitude of about 100 kilometers (62 miles). NEAR Shoemaker's current orbit affords a global look at Eros much like earlier in the mission, but from a more southerly perspective. The top of this mosaic shows Eros' saddle, and curving around at upper right is the large bright-and-dark groove . The bright curved feature is a broad topographic rise separating the saddle region from the most boulder-rich area on the asteroid .
Built and managed by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, NEAR was the first spacecraft launched in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, small-scale planetary missions. See the NEAR web page at http://near.jhuapl.edu/ for more details.
