Selected Articles from the
February 2001 Odyssey

Editor: Terry Hancock

• NEAR Shoemaker Touches Down, Terry Hancock
• Annual Activities Report for 2000, Steve Bartlett
• A Matter of Attitude, Part 2, Robert Gounley
• The Surf Report, Diane Rhodes

Last image transmitted before the landing. (NASA/JHU/APL) Click here for more.

This month, NEAR made history by landing a spacecraft for the first time ever on an asteroid (433 Eros). This is a remarkable achievement, especially considering that the spacecraft was not in any way designed to do this. It's a tribute to the creativity of the NEAR team at APL that they would think of this task and that they would take the risk to do it (although it can be argued that there was not much risk this late in the mission).

The spacecraft, now at the end of its planned mission, was directed to slowly descend onto the surface of the asteroid Eros. This was a big risk to the spacecraft, since it was not designed to land, but this late in the mission there wasn't much to lose. The spacecraft swooped in (very slowly) and landed in the region of the large crater Himeros, taking pictures at 1150 meters, 700 meters, and 250 meters, and finally at 120 meters (as shown above). As with most flyby probes, NEAR's camera was essentially a telephoto camera, so even though this sounds fairly high, the detail shown here is actually very fine.

Diagram of NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. (NASA/JHU/APL) Click here to enlarge.

This picture was actually cut off a bit because contact was lost with the spacecraft (due to the landing) while it was transmitting the image. The spacecraft was apparently intact, however, as it is continuing to transmit telemetry from the surface.

The NEAR team have extended the mission by about ten days to monitor the data being transmitted from the surface.

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