Intriguing images are flooding in from NASA’s NEAR spacecraft, which went
into orbit around the asteroid Eros last week. “It’s starting to look more
bizarre than we could have hoped for,” says Peter Thomas, an astronomer at
Cornell University in New York State. The images seem to show layers of
different rock composition. This may indicate that Eros is a chunk of a much
larger body—perhaps as big as the Moon—that formed a complex layered
structure before breaking up.
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