PASADENA - NASA reported Thursday that its first spacecraft ever slated to orbit an asteroid is on track for a Valentines Day encounter with a stony body named, appropriately enough, Eros.

At noon Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft fired its medium-sized thrusters for 90 seconds, slowing the probes speed relative to the asteroid 433 Eros to 18 m.p.h. (29 kilometers per hour) from 43 m.p.h. (69 kilometers per hour).

The maneuver was the first of two rendezvous burns needed to finalize NEARs approach to Eros, a potato-shaped rock 25 by 9 by 9 miles (40 by 14 by 14 kilometers) in size.

Originally, mission operators at Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory hoped to carry out the maneuver in one operation on February 2.

However, the spacecraft went into standby, or "safe," mode early that day.

"We were able to come back right away and devise a turnaround burn," said NEAR Mission Director Bob Farquhar in a statement. "It really shows the resiliency of the mission plans."

The spacecraft will now complete the burn on February 8, bumping its velocity up to 22 m.p.h. (35 kilometers per hour) and putting back en route for its encounter six days later.

Once it arrives in orbit around Eros at 10:33 a.m. EST on February 14, NEAR will spend more than a year studying and imaging it.

As of Thursday, NEAR was 5,047 miles (8,123 kilometers) away from Eros.

The $224 million mission was launched on February 17, 1996. Eros, named for the Greek god of love, was discovered in 1898.