You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Wallpaper: Asteroid Eros

Wallpaper: Eros

The NEAR spacecraft was designed to visit a few asteroids with the main target being one named Eros. This probe was meant only to orbit this object closely for a year… and it did. But as the probe ran out of feul and for lack of any reason not to, the controllers decided to attempt an impromptu landing on the surface. Even though the probe had not been designed to do this (it lacked landing gear of any kind) they managed to “rest” the probe carefully upon the surface in 2001 and it continued to transmit information back to Earth for more than 2 weeks from the surface.

Image Note: The color of the asteroid itself was enhanced to match that of the close up image included in the upper right. The original full image was black and white.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under 1440x900, Artistic Imaging, Asteroids, Wallpaper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Wallpaper: Asteroid Eros”

  1. wanderingspace » Blog Archive » June: Hayabusa Comes Home? Says:
    May 31st, 2010 at 1:37 am

    [...] first such mission ever intentionally designed to do so (NASA did have an impromptu touch down on 433 Eros in 2000, but that was more a controlled crash). Despite the pellet failures, mission specialists think that [...]

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