NEAR Shoemaker
NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and the first to land on one: a year at Eros, 2000 to 2001.
NEAR, NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, was the first mission of the agency's low-cost Discovery program and the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and then to land on one.[1] It was renamed NEAR Shoemaker in honor of the geologist Eugene Shoemaker.[2]
The journey
The spacecraft launched on 17 February 1996 and, on the way to its target, made a 25-minute flyby of the asteroid Mathilde on 27 June 1997.[1] It first flew past Eros on 23 December 1998, at a range of about 3,800 km, after an aborted engine burn cost it the planned orbit insertion.[1][2] It came back fourteen months later and moved into orbit around Eros on 14 February 2000, Valentine's Day.[1][2]
A year at Eros
NEAR Shoemaker studied Eros from orbit for nearly a year, at one point from an altitude of about 50 km.[1][2] On 12 February 2001 it descended to the surface at about 6.4 km per hour, taking 69 close-up photographs on the way down, and became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.[1][2] It kept sending data from the surface for about two weeks; the last contact was on 28 February 2001.[1]
What it returned
The mission sent back about ten times more data than planned, including 160,000 images.[1] They showed Eros to be a solid body with a density like that of Earth's crust, large craters, a long surface ridge, and boulders and fine dust across its surface.[1] The later asteroid missions, Japan's Hayabusa at Itokawa and NASA's OSIRIS-REx at Bennu, went on to bring pieces of their targets home.[2]
Milestones
- February 17, 1996Launch on a Delta II from Cape Canaveral
- June 27, 1997Flies past asteroid Mathilde
- December 23, 1998First flyby of Eros
- February 14, 2000Enters orbit around Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid
- February 12, 2001Lands on Eros, the first landing on an asteroid
- February 28, 2001Last contact from the surface
Sources
- [1]NASA, NEAR Shoemaker — science.nasa.gov, retrieved November 4, 2026
- [2]NASA, 433 Eros — science.nasa.gov, retrieved November 4, 2026
Related
- ErosThe first near-Earth asteroid ever found, in 1898, and the first asteroid a spacecraft orbited and landed on.
- HayabusaJAXA's Hayabusa, the first mission to bring back a piece of an asteroid: dust from Itokawa, collected in 2005 and returned to Earth in 2010.
- OSIRIS-APEXThe NASA spacecraft that returned samples from Bennu, sent on to study Apophis after the asteroid's close pass by Earth in 2029.
- Why missions visit asteroids and cometsWhat flybys, orbiters, landers, sample returns and impactors each learn about small bodies, and why that matters for science and for planetary defense.