Welcome to the NEAR Website

by Clark Chapman

Astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker always said that he wanted to travel to Eros, lasso it and hit it with a rock hammer. Eros, the size of a small city, is one of the largest of the asteroidal and cometary remnants from the solar system's birth that can venture near Earth. Shoemaker, co-discoverer of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which famously crashed into Jupiter in 1994, thought that Eros might be like a road cut in the heavens: it might reveal rock strata from the interior of the main-belt asteroid from which Eros fragmented long ago. Launched from Cape Canaveral in early 1996, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft is accomplishing Shoemaker's dream, at least metaphorically, as it orbits the little world and plies its surface with beams from a half-dozen remote-sensing instruments.

And NEAR is taking the first practical steps to the literal realization of Shoemaker's aspirations. Building on NEAR Shoemaker's detailed reconnaissance, future spacecraft will land on, or dock with, other small worlds like Eros, leading eventually to human exploration and mining endeavors, which will harvest asteroidal resources for space operations.

Only two centuries ago natural philosophers first realized that meteorites -- stones that fall from the skies -- are extraterrestrial rocks, not the fanciful imaginations of peasant farmers. At the same time, astronomers discovered the first asteroids, orbiting the Sun far beyond Mars, remnants of a planet that never formed. Just 100 years ago, Eros itself was found, in a path that comes far inside the orbit of Mars, close to Earth. It was given the number 433 -- the 433rd asteroid to have its orbit calculated; now, the orbits of 10,000 asteroids have been charted. Indeed, space scientists have come to realize that Earth lives within a veritable swarm of asteroidal fragments and dying comets, similar to Eros though generally smaller, grading down to the tiny meteoroids whose fiery demise we witness in our night skies.

The past impacts of mile-wide and larger near-Earth objects have shaped the course of the origin and evolution of life on our planet, and perhaps on other planets, too. One impact 65 million years ago opened the ecological niche that enabled mammals, including human beings, to replace the once-dominant dinosaurs. Such cosmic collisions even pose a slight risk today. Indeed, Eros itself may have a better than 1-in-20 chance of ending its existence by crashing into Earth, with devastating consequences, a few million years from now. In the near term, however, Eros and its brothers and sisters offer opportunities for space travelers - way stations en route to Mars, sources of fuel and other resources for space endeavors, and exotic, nearly gravity-free worlds for us all to marvel at.

For planetary scientists, like the late Gene Shoemaker, NEAR's study of Eros opens a window to our distant past, when Earth and other planets were forming by the gathering together of bodies like Eros. NEAR Shoemaker's explorations, the first-ever dedicated spacecraft investigations of an asteroid, will help researchers peer back to those formative epochs of solar system history and learn more about the precursors that formed a habitable world, like our own planet Earth.

NEAR Shoemaker is the product of state-of-the-art engineering at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The NEAR mission is among the first of NASA's series of innovative, low-cost, deep-space Discovery Program missions to study our cosmic environs. Long past its historic 1997 flyby of the carbonaceous asteroid Mathilde, NEAR Shoemaker is revealing the secrets of Eros to the scientists and engineers who designed its instruments and planned the spacecraft's orbital and observational sequences. The NEAR team invites you to share in the discoveries, beamed back to Earth via the Deep Space Network of radio telescopes, through the wonders of the Internet. Whether you are an educator, a journalist, a student or just a space enthusiast, these links will be updated for your use and enjoyment until the end of NEAR's mission to Eros.

Come join us as we explore Eros!

Clark R. Chapman
Southwest Research Inst.
1050 Walnut, Suite 426
Boulder, Colorado 80302 USA