Eros: Three weeks worth of approach images PIA02462
Eros18 This montage shows a selection of images of the asteroid 433 Eros that were acquired from the NEAR spacecraft over three weeks from January 22 through February 12, 2000, as the spacecraft's distance from its target shrank from 18,000 to 29,000 to 2025 km.
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Image Credit: Johns Hopkins University / Applied Physics Laboratory, NASA.  

As the spacecraft closed in on its target, the resolution of the images increased from 2.8 to 0.19 km per pixel. At 33 x 13 x 13 km in size, Eros is the second largest near-Earth asteroid and spins on its axis once every 5 hours, 16 minutes. During the early stages of NEAR's approach, Eros appeared as a small blob only a few pixels across. The apparent size of Eros and the resolution of the pictures increased continuously, at first only slowly and later dramatically day by day until, on February 9, the level of detail visible exceeded that during NEAR's first flyby of Eros on December 23, 1998. In the last images shown here, details of Eros's surface have become visible. Heavy cratering has pockmarked the irregular asteroid's surface. One side is dominated by a scallop-rimmed gouge, and the opposite side by a conspicuous, raised-rimmed crater.  
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