NEAR Shoemaker made the first asteroid landing in 2001

NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid on February 12, 2001, settling onto 433 Eros at under 4 miles per hour, about walking pace. It was an orbiter never designed to land, and the touchdown was an improvised finale after a year circling the 21-mile-long, potato-shaped rock.

Sources disagree on the time because they measure different things. NASA logs touchdown at 19:44 UT. Mission control at Johns Hopkins APL saw it at 3:01:52 p.m. EST (20:01:52 UT), roughly 18 minutes later, which matches the time a radio signal needs to cross the 200 million miles to Earth, so NASA’s figure most likely marks the moment at Eros itself.

NEAR was never meant to be there so late, let alone land. Launched in 1996 as the first mission of NASA’s low-cost Discovery program, it should have entered orbit in early 1999, but an aborted engine burn on December 20, 1998 sent it on a backup route. It finally became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid on February 14, 2000. By the end of its year in orbit it had returned about 10 times more data than planned, including 160,000 images, so the team attempted a slow, controlled descent to the surface.

On the way down it took 69 pictures, at the time the sharpest ever made of an asteroid, from as close as 394 feet. The final frame was cut off at the bottom when the spacecraft hit the surface. It survived, and its gamma-ray spectrometer kept measuring the soil until February 28.

“One miracle after another unfolds, and we are left stunned and speechless.” — Andy Cheng, NEAR project scientist

Japan’s Hayabusa missions and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx have since touched asteroids on purpose.