Stereo Eros
Get out your
red/blue glasses and float next to
asteroid 433 Eros, 260 million kilometers away!
Orbiting the Sun once every 1.8 earth-years,
asteroid Eros is a diminutive 40 x 14 x 14 kilometer
world of undulating horizons,
craters, boulders and valleys.
Its unsettling scale and bizarre shape are emphasized in
this picture - a mosaic of recent images from
the NEAR spacecraft
processed to yield a
stereo anaglyphic view.
Along with dramatic
chiaroscuro, NEAR's 3-D imaging
provides important measurements of the asteroid's landforms
and structures, and hopefully
clues to the origin of this
city-sized chunk of
solar system.
The smallest features visible here are about 30 meters across.