Adam Frank for McGraw-Hill

Sometimes you just have to hold your breath to take it all in. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by that most venerable of human emotions - wonder. This is not an easy thing to do in our culture which seems to nurture cynicism and studied boredom more than an honest sense of awe. So when the chance presents itself you gotta grab it.

Over the past few months an intrepid space probe called NEAR has been sending back home movies of its remarkable encounter with a flying mountain. The images, and the reality which lies behind them, calls on us to recognize the extraordinary in the midst of our ordinary lives. That, more than anything else, is the real point of Science.

The goal of the NEAR mission is to get a spacecraft close to an asteroid and leave it there. Asteroids are giant chunks of rock and metal which orbit the sun just like we do. They are, however, too small to be considered planets. Most asteroids are just a few miles across though there are a few monsters that span 600 miles. The majority of asteroids are scattered in a belt lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some of the rocky travelers do come closer to home, making it all the way to the inner solar system. These are called Near Earth Asteroids or NEAs (NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous). It's the bits of NEAs that break off the parent mass and reach Earth that become the familiar meteors of our night sky.

For astronomers asteroids are a treasure-trove of information. In a very real sense they are a kind of construction debris left over from the time when the solar system was being assembled. Asteroids are either proto-planets that never made it or planets that blew apart in collision. If astronomers could learn more about the composition and structure of asteroids they'd have better shot at understanding how our, and perhaps other, planetary systems formed. There are other reasons asteroids are of interest. It's estimated that a half-mile asteroid holds about one trillion dollars' worth of iron, nickel, cobalt, and platinum. That could make somebody's day. On the flip side there is also the small point that any collision with a moderate sized asteroid could wipe out a good fraction of all life on Earth.

OK, enough science for a moment. Yes, asteroids are scientifically interesting. Blah, blah, blah. For now that is not what matters. For now, what matters are the movies. What I really want you to do is visit the NEAR website and watch the movies. They are amazing, giving you a spacecraft eye's view as NEAR dances along its host, the asteroid 433 Eros. 433 Eros is a spinning, 35 kilometer long, potato shaped asteroid (the number denotes Eros as the 433rd such body discovered). The NEAR probe has been traveling in orbit with Eros since August of 1999, happily taking pictures as it cartwheels around the giant stone. Stringing these images together NASA has created movies of stunning beauty.

In the movies you can watch as the sunlit side of the tumbling asteroid comes into view. The spacecraft's perspective sails above the pitted surface with a liquid motion only possible in space. Shadows shift across a giant gouge or "saddle" at the asteroid's center as the vast mountain spins in elegant silence. It is like something out of a dream. These are not Hollywood special effects. It's the real deal 119 million miles from the Earth. It is grace and power combined in billions of tons of rock.

No one has ever seen something like this before. You are the first generation of humans to know such a sight. That in itself is worthy of a long moment of reflection if not full blown wonder.

NEAR Movies: http://near.jhuapl.edu/Images/.Anim.html