The project I worked on this summer was part of the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, or NEAR for short. I worked for Mark Robinson and Ann Harch, and with Jessica Edmonds. Our job was to simulate which pictures the multispectral imager, the MSI, would take when the NEAR spacecraft was in its 100 kilometer orbit around asteroid 433 Eros.
Three weeks ago, when Jessica gave her talk, she told you the specifics of what we did in order to simulate this. So I'm going to talk more about NEAR's instruments, the significance of this mission, and the difficulties that are involved in taking pictures of Eros.
Or, "Who cares about a dumb asteroid," and "why did this take you a whole summer?"