NEAR Shoemaker photographed the southern part of Eros' saddle region on December 19, 2000, from an orbital altitude of 37 kilometers (23 miles). The low ridge in the foreground (bottom) casts a wedge-shaped shadow against the hill in the background. The surface here is packed with boulders, the largest of which (near the center of the picture) is about 60 meters (200 feet) across. The whole scene is about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) across.

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.