Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission is the first launch in the Discovery Program, an initiative of NASA for small planetary missions. NEAR is managed for NASA by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The NEAR mission objective is to orbit an asteroid for a year and collect data from a suite of sensors. The target asteroid is 433 Eros, the second largest Earth-crossing asteroid. As the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, NEAR promises to provide observations that will be invaluable towards answering fundamental questions about the nature and origin of near-Earth objects, such as the numerous asteroids and comets in the vicinity of Earth's orbit.

Mission Objectives

The NEAR mission will make the first quantitative and comprehensive measurements of an asteroid's composition and structure. The measurements have been identified by the National Academy of Sciences as the most important scientific objectives in the exploration of primitive bodies. Primary scientific goals of the NEAR mission are to measure:

Prof. Maria Zuber is the team leader of the NEAR laser ranging (NLR) investigation. The objective of our investigation is to use the NLR altimetry and the Doppler tracking data from the radio science experiment to perform a joint inversion to conpute the geodetically-referenced shape of the body and to obtain precise solutions for asteroidal dynamcis parameters (pole position, obliquity, spin state, etc.). We are also interested in how we can relate the detailed shape of the asteroid to the mechanisms of formation and evolution. On a more regional scale, our team will also be engaging in analysis of the geological processes that have shaped Eros by studying altimetry that has been correlated with images from the NEAR Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI).

Check out our first results on the shape of Eros as published in Science, 289, 2097-2100, 2000.

And here are some excellent 3-D animations, done by our group in collaboration with the Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA/GSFC.

[Current Research] [Planetary Missions] [People] [Research Affiliates]

address comments to:

Maria Zuber (zuber@mit.edu)