BREAKING NEWS: Asteroid EROS has Easter Island type face that breathes. Date: 7/12/99 7:15:55 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: donakhov@yahoo.com (Dimitri Donakhov) To: hilly@hillyrose.com, artbell@mindspring.com, webmaster@artbell.com, FCW583@aol.com, bardsquill@aol.com, CNINEWS1@aol.com CC: space7@aol.com, whitley@strieber.com, keithr@rowlandnet.com, ufocongress@uswest.net, tbyberg@aol.com, reporters@press.co.nz, tongj@lynx.bc.ca, travlers@eoni.com, webmaster@theunexplainedsite.com The asteroid Eros was photographed from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft on December 23, 1998, when NEAR flew within 2320 miles (3830 kilometers) of the asteroid. A movie of Eros as it was seen by NEAR during 5 hours and 21 minutes of the flyby is available on the Internet and contains highly unusual anomalies. The NEAR spacecraft was originally supposed to rendezvous with the asteroid Eros in early 1999. A flyby was performed instead due to the mysterious termination of the firing of NEAR's main engine on December 20, 1998. Contact with NEAR was lost for 27 hours after the spacecraft autonomously turned off the engine that would have allowed it to rendezvous. Instead the rendezvous with Eros has now been rescheduled for February 2000. The mystery of the failed firing pales in comparison to the questions raised by the movie made during the unscheduled flyby three days later. Asteroid Eros flyby movie contains several anomalies are as yet unexplained by NASA scientists. These include a humanoid face in the style of the massive Easter Island statues, apparent reorienting of the asteroid rotation to make the Eros face more visible to the NEAR spacecraft, explosive gas events that may be related to intentional reorienting of Eros, and an extraordinarily bright spot that could be sunlight glinting off a window of a artificial structure protectively built into the wall of a 1/2 mile (1000 meter) wide crater on the distant asteroid. The Eros flyby movie can be downloaded from the following web page at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory: http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/19990121/index.html The direct download address of the 2.3 MegaByte movie is: http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/19990121/erosflyby.mpg The movie shows about two-thirds of a rotation of Eros. The first view, taken at 10:44 AM EST December 23, 1998 from a range of 7150 miles (11,890 km), shows about half of the dayside of Eros (phase angle 87°). The movie ends at 2:05 PM EST, just after closest approach, when only a tiny portion of the dayside of Eros is seen (phase angle 119°). Unusual events and sights are seen as several points during the movie. The "mpeg" movie file has a running time of 48 seconds on a Windows computer. Eros is visible starting at the 16th second which corresponds to 10:44 AM EST and fades from view at the 44th second which is 2:05 PM EST. Thus each of the 26 seconds of asteroid display time on the movie file is equivalent to 12 minutes and 18.5 seconds of elapsed time during the actual flyby. Irregular rotation of the asteroid in the early part of the movie may indicate that it was being actively positioned so that the Eros face would be lighted by the Sun for optimal viewing from the NEAR spacecraft. This irregular motion appears from 16 to 18 seconds into the 48 second "mpeg" movie. The Eros face is visible from 24 to 29 seconds into the movie. The face is visible in the upper half of the asteroid, facing toward the right. The face has a striking resemblance to the Easter Island statues that were erected in ancient times on that remote island by an unknown people or entities. Of course any actual direct connection between the Eros face and the Easter Island statues would be pure conjecture at this point. The possible cause of the irregular steering motion is seen at 24 seconds into the movie and again at 25 to 26 seconds as two enormous explosive bursts are clearly visible emanating from the nasal and oral area of the Eros face. These powerful bursts are several miles in diameter and clearly have enough energy to cause the irregular motion that was seen earlier when the explosive region was hidden. A crater about 1/2 mile (roughly 1000 meters) in diameter then comes into view at 34 seconds on the center of the lower lobe of the rotating asteroid. Suddenly at 36 seconds there is a brilliant flash that appears to arise from a reflection off of a flat glass or reflecting surface on the inner rim of the crater. Scientists from NASA and the Applied Physics Laboratory have made no comment about these unusual and unexplained observations. - Dimitri Donakhov