On Monday, Feb. 12, at 3:02 EST, NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft traveled its last mile, cruising to the surface of asteroid Eros at a gentle 4 mph-finally coming to rest after its five-year, 2-billion-mile journey, achieving all its science goals and collecting 10 times more data than originally planned.

Cheers filled the Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., when NEAR Mission Director Robert Farquhar announced, "I'm happy to say the spacecraft is safely on the surface of Eros."

Landing on Eros was not part of the original mission plan, but it was decided to be a risk worth taking in pursuit of close-up, detailed photos of the asteroid's rocky surface during the descent. To everyone's delight, NEAR Shoemaker performed flawlessly and transmitted richly detailed pictures until its radio link to Earth was broken upon touchdown.

The last image snapped by NEAR Shoemaker was a mere 394 feet (120 meters) from the asteroid's surface and covered a 20-foot (6-meter) area. As the spacecraft touched down it began sending a beacon, assuring the team that the landing had been gentle. The signal was identified by radar science data, and about an hour later was locked onto by NASA's Deep Space Network antennas, which will monitor the spacecraft until Feb. 14.

Final Eros ../../../images: Range 250 meters (820 Feet) (Click image for full size view)

NEAR Shoemaker, which spent a year in orbit around Eros, started its final descent with an engine burn at 10:31 a.m. (EST) that nudged the spacecraft toward Eros from about 16 miles (26 kilometers) away. Then four braking maneuvers brought the spacecraft to rest on the asteroid's surface in an area just outside a saddle-shaped depression, Himeros. When it touched down, NEAR Shoemaker became the first spacecraft ever to land, or even attempt to land, on an asteroid. The success was sweetened by the fact that NEAR Shoemaker was not designed as a lander.

Details of NEAR Shoemaker's landing will be discussed at a press conference at 1 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 14. The press conference will be telecast live on a Ku band satellite at: Telstar K5 97 degrees West Longitude Transponder 12 Downlink Frequency 11936 MHz Horizontal Polarity Audio 6.2 & 6.8. Live webcasts will be broadcast on the Internet at http://spaceflightnow.com/ and http://space.com/.

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