An asteroid photographed by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft during a 25-minute fly-by in June 1997 at a distance of 1 200 km. Mathilde is a rocky, carbon-rich asteroid, one of the darkest objects in the Solar System, reflecting only 3.6% of the sunlight it receives. It is approximately 50 × 50 × 70 km in size, one-millionth the mass of the Moon, heavily cratered (five craters are larger than 20 km), and rotates only every 17.4 days. NEAR Shoemaker took 534 images of Mathilde, including some in colour, using its sensitive multispectral camera.
The data from Mathilde was the first science return from NASA's Discovery Program.