NEAR Shoemaker Lands on Asteroid Eros
On this day · 12 February 2001
A spacecraft never meant to land gently settled onto a 21-mile space rock, making history half a galaxy from home.
On February 12, 2001, NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker probe became the first spacecraft ever to land on an asteroid, touching down on 433 Eros after a year spent orbiting the potato-shaped world. The descent ended a journey of more than 2 billion miles around the inner solar system.
The catch: NEAR Shoemaker was an orbiter, never engineered to survive a landing. A carefully staged sequence of braking maneuvers eased it onto the surface at a gentle 4 miles per hour, settling just south of a saddle-shaped feature named Himeros at roughly 3:01 p.m. EST.
Against the odds, the spacecraft survived the bumpy touchdown intact.
From the surface, its gamma-ray spectrometer kept returning valuable data for about two weeks, sampling the composition of the 21-mile-long asteroid up close. Contact was lost on February 28 as the probe succumbed to the deep cold. The mission honored geologist Eugene Shoemaker, proving that a craft built only to circle a world could also come to rest upon it.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
