Abstract
On June 27 at 8:40 EDT, NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft flew within 1200 km of asteroid 253 Mathilde and snapped pictures for 25 minutes. An hour later, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), scientists were in for a few surprises as the images formed on their computer screens.First, they saw a very deep shadow caused by a 20‐km‐wide crater, which turned out to be one of Mathilde's many scars. “The degree to which the asteroid has been battered by collisions is astounding,” said Joseph Veverka of Cornell University, who leads the missions's imaging science team. “At first glance, there are more huge craters than there is asteroid.”
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