Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
NEAR Shoemaker's Controlled Descent to Eros
February 12, 2001

NEAR Shoemaker's historic soft landing on Eros turned out to be a mission planner's dream - providing NEAR team members with more scientific and engineering information than they ever expected from the carefully designed series of descent maneuvers. The controlled descent took about 4 ½ hours, starting with a 20-second de-orbit maneuver at 10:31 a.m., Eastern time, with the spacecraft about 16 miles (26 kilometers) from Eros. Four braking maneuvers followed:

2:16 p.m.
Braking Maneuver 1
Altitude: 4.3 miles (6.9 kilometers)
Duration: 2 minutes, 59 seconds


2:31 p.m.
Braking Maneuver 2
Altitude: 2.5 miles (4.1 kilometers)
Duration: 6 minutes, 15 seconds


2:47 p.m.
Braking Maneuver 3
Altitude: 1 mile (1.6 kilometers)
Duration: 7 minutes, 19 seconds

2:58 p.m.
Braking Maneuver 4
Altitude: 1,287 feet (390 meters)
Duration: 3 minutes, 4 seconds
Cut off on contact with surface at 3:01:52 p.m.

The touchdown speed of less than 4 miles per hour (between 1.5 and 1.8 meters per second) was one of the softest planetary landings ever. Despite being an orbiter that was not designed to land, NEAR Shoemaker continued operating and communicating with the NEAR mission team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Team members then commanded craft's gamma-ray spectrometer to gather data on the elemental composition on and just below the asteroid's surface.


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Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous