Jun 27 1997
From The Space Library
NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft engaged in a high-speed flyby of asteroid 253 Mathilde, capturing startlingly clear images of the huge space rock. Scientists had discovered Mathilde more than 100 years ago but, until the successful NEAR mission, they had been unable to take useful pictures of the 33-mile-around (53-kilometer-around) asteroid. NEAR Mission Director Robert W. Farquhar of the Applied Physics Laboratory praised the mission as "one of the most successful flybys of all time." In the color images, the asteroid resembled a massive gray potato with deep gashes scarring its surface. Some of the craters on the asteroid were large enough to "swallow the District of Columbia," according to one scientist who viewed the images as they were taken. The pictures also revealed that the rock was smaller than scientists had previously estimated and that it reflected only 3 percent of the Sun's light, making it twice as dark as a piece of charcoal. Scientists hoped that the new data might reveal why the asteroid rotates at the extremely slow rate of one rotation every 17.4 days. NEAR's multispectral imager took the pictures using very little of the spacecraft's solar-based power, a significant accomplishment, since NEAR was approximately 186 million miles (300 million kilometers) from the Sun when it captured the images.
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