WASHINGTON -- A Space Age form of electronic euthanasia has occurred far from Earth.

On Feb. 28, scientists and engineers placed the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker probe into deep-space slumber. Breaking radio ties with the spacecraft brings to a close a five-year mission to go where no craft had gone before.

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Following a year of orbiting Asteroid 433 Eros, NEAR Shoemaker softly settled down Feb. 12 atop the crusty rock of ages. Subsequently, NASA granted science teams a two-week extension so the craft could beam back to Earth quality science data from the space rocks topside.

The giant mountain of a mini-world is over 196 million miles (316 million kilometers) from Earth.

Over the last 14 days, a NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) radio dish in Goldstone, California has repeatedly siphoned information from NEAR Shoemaker as it rests on Eros dusty and boulder-rich terrain. But with new surface data in hand, scientists are in a quandary about Eros and the link between asteroids and known meteorite types.

Extreme silent treatment

"Were putting the spacecraft into hibernation," said Robert Farquhar, NEAR mission director at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. APL designed, built and is managing the asteroid mission for NASA.

The last contact with NEAR Shoemaker occurred Wednesday night.

"Its going into suspended animation," Farquhar said. He added that NEAR Shoemaker is likely to die a slow death as the solar-powered probe receives less and less sunlight beginning at the end of March. Total darkness will descend where the car-sized satellite sits starting August 8.

"NEAR Shoemaker will see no sunlight at all then, and theres going to be very little before that," Farquhar told SPACE.com.

First glimmers of the suns rays strike the NEAR Shoemaker landing area in mid November. Over those three months, the craft, its electronic innards and onboard instruments, are not likely to survive. Full sunlight wont fall upon the probe until August 2002.

"The mission basically ends We got a 14-day extension. So, roughly, it has been a 5-year mission since we were launched on February 17, 1996," Farquhar said.

The long goodbye

Price tag for the long-term survey of Eros by the econo-class spacecraft is $223 million. NEAR Shoemaker is a part of NASAs Discovery-class of probes that are of the cheaper, better and faster variety.

Also offering up a reluctant farewell to NEAR Shoemaker is Jacob Trombka, team leader for NEAR Shoemakers gamma ray spectrometer instrument at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It is his instrument that has benefited greatly by the landing and the two-week extension of the spacecrafts mission.

"We hope to get the last transmission tomorrow before we say goodbye," Trombka told SPACE.com in a Feb. 27 interview.

Trombka said the data received so far are excellent, as well as puzzling.

"Were in good shape. The spectra data from the surface has shown us some very interesting properties of Eros, which we were not aware of. You always learn in situations like this. In order to understand what were seeing is what we believe we see, its going to take a little while for us to convince ourselves," Trombka said.

The gamma ray spectrometer is designed to decipher the elemental composition of Eros.

"We dont want to go too fast. We want to make sure our analysis is correct. We dont want to do instant data analysis," Trombka said. One curious find from the probes magnetometer is that no remnant magnetism has been found on Eros. Yet the gamma ray data does show an iron signal, which means that Eros is loaded with a demagnetized iron of some sort, he said.

"Those two factors are causing us to scratch our head, to try and figure out whats going on here," Trombka said. "Eros is a very primitive body. The question is whether this is a primitive body that we havent seen here on Earth in terms of meteorites collected to date," he said.

Gamma ray data collected so far points to the fact that, indeed, the top covering of rock and dirt has been churned up from Eros itself. "We may change our mind, but thats what it looks like," Trombka said.

Clark Chapman, a NEAR Shoemaker science team member at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said that the gamma ray data are a great outcome of the mission.

Chapman, like Trombka, said that going slow in sifting through the science data is key. No rush to judgment is necessary.

"Your best situation with the gamma ray spectrometer is to be buried in the dirt. And, lo and behold, hes apparently got good data. Thats a terrific outcome," Chapman said.

"Science is something that you ponder over for months. The pace of science has really quickened a lot. Its likely that snapshot views will be incomplete and turn out to be wrong. That doesnt mean they shouldnt be talked about, but youve got to be careful," Chapman said.

For Trombka, months of work are ahead to unravel what stories the gamma ray spectrometer is telling about Eros.

"Weve got quite an interesting picture. The job is for us to understand the mechanisms which produced such a body," Trombka said.

"Its like meteorites we see on Earth. But there are certain different things that were seeing that[are]causing us to scratch our heads. But that is what discovery is all about."