Asteroid 253 Mathilde in color

NASA / JHUAPL / Cornell / colorized image by Daniel Macháček

Asteroid 253 Mathilde in color

NEAR captured this photo of asteroid 253 Mathilde on June 27, 1997; Mathilde was the target of a flyby encounter nearly three years before the mission went on to orbit asteroid 433 Eros.

This image has been artificially colorized to match its likely appearance to a human observer. As a C-type asteroid, Mathilde is very dark, darker than asphalt. It is 59 by 47 kilometers in diameter.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For uses not allowed by that license, contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder: Daniel Macháček