NASA's Deep Space Network antennas brought down the last Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission data tonight, bringing to a close the first mission to extensively study an asteroid. Throughout its year-long orbit and its landing on Eros, NEAR has delighted astronomy enthusiasts and scientists alike.

"This mission has been successful far beyond what was in the original mission plan," said NEAR Mission Director Dr. Robert Farquhar of APL. "We got the first ../../../images of a C-class asteroid when we added a flyby of asteroid Mathilde in 1997; we added two low altitude series of passes over the ends of Eros this past October and January that gave us spectacular ../../../images from 2.7 kilometers above the surface; and we achieved the first landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid on Feb. 12. All this at no extra cost. When you talk about 'faster, cheaper, better,' this is what 'better' means."

On Feb. 12, NEAR Shoemaker made a gentle 3-point landing on the tips of two solar panels and the bottom edge of the spacecraft body. But the mission wasn't finished yet. Much to the amazement of the mission team and millions of observers around the world who were following the descent, after touchdown the craft was still operating and sending a signal back to Earth.

Jumping at the chance to get "bonus science" from the spacecraft, which had already collected 10 times more data than originally planned, the mission team asked for and got a 10-day extension and then four more days of DSN antenna time, enabling NEAR Shoemaker to send back data through Feb. 28. The extension was granted by NASA to allow the gamma-ray spectrometer to collect data from an ideal vantage point about four inches from the surface. The spectrometer team quickly redesigned software and uploaded it to the spacecraft so they could begin collecting elemental composition readings.

The results were spectacular. "This is the first gamma-ray experiment that has ever been done on the surface of a body other than Earth," said Dr. Jacob Trombka, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who heads the gamma-ray spectrometer team. "In fact, we can say it's the first feasibility study of how to design an instrument to be used on a rover that could select samples from the surface, look for the presence of water, or map the surface for the purpose of future mining."

"It will take months to scrutinize the data the team retrieved after the spacecraft landed," Trombka said. "What we're looking for is information that will help us more precisely classify Eros and determine the relationship between the asteroid and meteorites that have fallen to Earth."

Project Scientist Dr. Andrew Cheng of APL said now scientists can begin to study the data, including the more than 160,000 detailed ../../../images taken by the spacecraft. "We solved mysteries, we unveiled more mysteries. Now we're sharing the amazing amount of data that we collected with scientists all over the world, to sort through and debate and hopefully to help us discover facts about Eros and our solar system that no one knows today."

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