Main Sections LabIR main page . ... On January 9, 1998 a mail was circulated by D. Dunham , announcing a peculiar type of event to take place later on the same day, namely a glint produced by solar panels of the space probe NEAR as they reflected shortly the solar light towards the Earth from a distance of about 8 million km. ... At the TIRGO observatory, we set out to measure the event although last minute revised predictions by Dunham were now pessimistic about the actual chance of observation. ...