From: Ndunlks@aol.com
Date sent: Sat, 28 Jun 1997 04:23:36 -0400 (EDT)
To: iufo@world.std.com
Subject: IUFO: Robot Craft Photographs Strange Asteroid

Robot Craft Photographs Strange Asteroid

.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - A spacecraft racing past an asteroid millions of miles from Earth captured spectacular views, with clear images of a miles-deep crater punched into the battered, coal-black surface of a space rock named Mathilde.

``Everything was against us, but we got great pictures, right off the bat,'' an excited Robert W. Farquhar, the mission director for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, said Friday. ``I can't believe it. We can expect great things from this now.''

Farquhar, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, added: ``We didn't make any mistakes.''

In the photos, Mathilde resembles a gray potato with huge chunks gouged out, floating in a midnight-dark field of black. At 750 miles, it was the closest a spacecraft has ever come to an asteroid.

Donald K. Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Mathilde appears to be about 37 miles across, although the spacecraft could capture views of only one side.

Mathilde has a shadowed dark crater, estimated by some as more than 10 miles deep, that cuts to the heart of the rock. Other facets of the jagged body are scarred and pocked with gouges and jagged ridges.

Yeomans said the mass of Mathilde, estimated from the gravitational effect on the spacecraft, is about one one-millionth that of the moon.

``It is considerably lighter than we thought,'' said Yeomans.

Experts said it may be lighter because there also are large craters on the unseen side of the rock. Or, the object could be a loose conglomerate of rocks with empty spaces in between instead of a dense, compact body.

Gravity on Mathilde is so slight that an object weighing one ton on the Earth would have an apparent weight on the asteroid of four pounds.

``You could throw a rock off this object into orbit very easily,'' said Yeomans.

Mathilde is thought to be high in carbon content, which is the reason it is so black. The photos were manipulated to give a lighter appearance than the object would actually have, said Clark R. Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute.

``It is blacker than a piece of coal,'' he said. ``Most asteroids are like that.''

One of the puzzling things about Mathilde, said Chapman, is that it spins so slowly it takes 17 days to make one rotation. Most asteroids rotate once in five or six hours.

``This thing just hovers,'' he said, noting that scientists still have no explanation.

The number and depth of Mathilde's craters are also stunning.

``It's more crater than asteroid,'' said Eugene Shoemaker of the University of Arizona, the famed comet discoverer who viewed Mathilde images as they were released. ``If it is just a loose collection, you could get very large craters'' from the impact of small asteroids.

Photographing Mathilde was an improvised mission for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, or NEAR, spacecraft. The spacecraft is on its way to Eros, another asteroid, where it is scheduled to arrive in January 1999.

It was after the craft was designed for Eros that scientists discovered it would pass near Mathilde. The only way to get pictures, they found, was to swing the whole spacecraft to point at the rock as the craft swept by at 22,000 miles an hour. There was only time for about 500 images in the 25-minutes flyby.

Since the craft is so far from Earth - some 180 million miles - signals take 36 minutes to make a round trip. As a result, the scientists loaded instructions in the NEAR computer ahead of time. The technique worked perfectly, said Farquhar. ``The proof is in the pictures.''

AP-NY-06-27-97 1915EDT