12 фев 2001 г. - NEAR Shoemaker arrives at Eros

Описание:

On 12th February 2001, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros, a near-Earth object, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), part of the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA, designed the robotic spacecraft for NASA. It launched in 1996 and rendezvoused with Eros in February 2000, orbiting it several times over the next year, before touching down on the surface.

NEAR's primary scientific objectives included returning data on the bulk properties, composition, mineralogy, morphology, internal mass distribution, and magnetic field of Eros – an S-type asteroid roughly 13 × 13 × 33 km in size, making it the second largest near-Earth asteroid. The secondary objectives included studies of regolith properties, interactions with the solar wind, possible current activity as indicated by dust or gas, and the asteroid spin state.

In addition to its main instruments and camera, the spacecraft carried a radio science experiment, which used a tracking system to estimate the gravity field of the asteroid.