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EROS and the NEAR SHOEMAKER SPACECRAFT
The following is information published by JPL and NASA about what has been observed from photos and data received from this mission.
My beliefs and those of the experts are not exactly the same.
The claim at (1), I believe, is correct. In my view, Eros could have been 4 billion years old when earth was little more than a planetisimal.
All the photographs I have looked at on the JPL site confirm what I expected; but I see the results differently from the scientists. (2), shows a typical example of an asteroid having been covered by a blanket of rocks and dust that have impacted it continually since its origins some 10 billion years ago. Science says that Eros is an accumulation of this type of solid matter that has come together, near enough to, the orbit around the sun it now occupies. They also say that this material has somehow become fused together as a conglomerated solid boulder. My explanation of the scene, instead, tallies with what the photos show.
I believe that Eros, and maybe all asteroids, are formed from molten ejecta blasted out into orbit by and around the sun, and around two or three solar widths away from it. In the case of the asteroid belt, these ejecta were supposed to have attracted each other while molten and semi-molten, and become the planetisimal that was to have become the planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The fact that they didn't, leads me to believe that Jupiter, being a very large mass, gravitationally pulled the primeval asteroid belt apart causing it to separate its components, preventing a snowballing type collection to take place. see:- Genesis Continuous, for a full explanation.
Judging by the impacting shown in the photos, it looks to me that the real Eros, ie., the solidified, molten original, that I believe is there, is covered by a few meters of rocks and dust that have been attracted to it over its lifetime. Some of that material has been large, and some nothing bigger than dust particles, but it all has struck at widely different velocities and from different angles. Some pieces have penetrated right through the loose layer to the solid rock below, and only the very earliest impacts would have penetrated when Eros was still plastic. Probably all craters visible now are impact induced.
I also anticipate that the structure of the original rock will be crystaline and, within, the crystals will be huge, because Eros is a very large body and would have taken a much longer time to cool down than a small meteorite would. - David C Hardy 18 March 2001 -
Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC September 21, 2000
(Phone: 202/358-1547)
Michael Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD
(Phone: 240/228-7536)
Bill Steigerwald
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5017)
Martha Heil
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-0850)
NOTE TO EDITORS: N00-045
ASTEROID EROS YEILDS SECRETS FROM TIME
BEFORE EARTH WAS BORN
(1) The asteroid Eros
is so ancient it could have witnessed the
formation of the Earth, according to findings from NASA's Near
Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker spacecraft published
today.
Four scientific papers published in the September 22 issue of the
journal Science represent the largest one-time release of
scientific data about Eros since the mission began. The NEAR
Shoemaker spacecraft has been in orbit around the primitive
Manhattan-sized asteroid since last February.
The four scientific teams publishing this week include the NEAR X-
ray Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (XGRS) team, the Multispectral Imager
and now-silent Near-Infrared Spectrometer team, the Laser
Rangefinder team and the Radio Science team.
The NEAR mission is managed by the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD, for NASA's Office
of Space Science.
The NEAR Shoemaker web site contains the latest results and high-
resolution images and information:
http://near.jhuapl.edu
The following is the caption and info pertaining to one of the Eros photographs:-
(2) Regolith, Regolith
This
picture of Eros, taken by NEAR Shoemaker on January 14, 2001, from an orbital
altitude of 38 kilometers (24 miles), visually summarizes the unexpected
nature of small-scale features on the asteroid's surface. Armed with a
prejudice that the Moon's surface is typical of an airless body, one might
expect Eros' surface to be dominated at all scales by craters. Instead,
in an image like this, which shows features as small as 6 meters (19 feet)
across, the surface is dominated by a blanket of regolith. Boulders litter
the landscape, and the smallest craters are obscured - at times almost
beyond recognition. Many of the low spots are extremely flat, and appear
infilled. The whole scene is about 1.1 kilometers (0.7 miles) across.
(Image 0154882617) http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20010124/index.html
http://www.spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast19feb_1.htm
If I am proven right that there is solid rock a short distance under the surface of Eros and that it was once molten, then I ask Science to look again at Genesis Continuous and to accept, once and for all, that the planets were not formed a way out in the orbits they now occupy. They had to start their journey in close to the sun, one by one.