Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to asteroid 433 Eros, 260 million kilometres away! Orbiting the Sun once every 1.8 earth-years, asteroid Eros is a diminutive 40 x 14 x 14 kilometre 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 metres across.