With only 27 days until its encounter with Eros, the NEAR spacecraft has sent back the first image of the potato-shaped asteroid. Taken January 12 with NEAR's Multispectral Imager, the picture was snapped from 27,200 miles away. Eros appears only as a white speck on the black background of deep space. However, mission navigators use these early ../../../images to confirm the asteroid's location and keep the spacecraft on the right course. More photos will follow in the weeks leading up to NEAR's Feb. 14 rendezvous with Eros.

NEAR is the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, returning science data to answer fundamental questions about the origin and composition of asteroids, comets, and our solar system.

On January 11, the NEAR Mission Operations Center at the Applied Physics Laboratory began round-the-clock monitoring of the spacecraft. The 24-hour operations mark a milestone in the mission to Eros, which intensifies with rendezvous maneuvers on February 2 and the actual orbit insertion on February 14. NEAR's instruments are already collecting valuable navigation data and detailed scientific information on the large space rock. Starting January 11, the NEAR team will begin downloading this information daily through NASA's Deep Space Network. The raw data will be available on the NEAR Science Data Center Web site a week after it's collected.

"The spacecraft is doing a lot of work, and we need to make sure things are happening the way we expect," says Mark Holdridge, NEAR mission operations manager. "This is the stretch drive as we prepare for the orbit insertion."

Click here for the latest news leading up to the encounter and other information about the NEAR mission.

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