NEAR Mathilde . ... Credit Copyright: NEAR Spacecraft Team , JHUAPL , NASA Explanation: Hey Earth, look what I found! On the way to visiting the asteroid 433 Eros in February 1999, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft flew right by another asteroid: 253 Mathilde last Friday. Shown above is one picture from the encounter. Mathilde is a large chunk of rock roughly 60 kilometers across that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt . ...