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	NEAR Orbiter Pulls Away From Asteroid Eros By Maia Weinstock Staff Writer posted: 08:36 am ET 30 July 2000

NEAR Orbiter Pulls Away from Asteroid Eros

After five months of inching closer for a better view of its main target, NASAs Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker (NEAR-Shoemaker) probe has begun pulling away.

Earlier this week in a controlled maneuver by engineers back on Earth, the NEAR-Shoemaker orbiter was shifted into a new orbit around 433 Eros, the asteroid its been eyeing since February of this year. The change in altitude, from a distance of 22 miles (35 km) to 31 miles (50 km) will allow the probe to continue its operations without depleting its systems of limited fuel.

"If we stay at a lower altitude, wed have to expend a lot more fuel," said NEAR-Shoemaker project scientist Andy Cheng. "We want to avoid that, so were going back up."

Eye-popping high-resolution images of Eros surface will, for now, become a thing of the past, said Cheng. But NEAR-Shoemakers new orbit will still allow scientists to continue on their mission to study the compositional makeup of the asteroid, the first to ever be orbited by an interplanetary probe.

Artists rendition of the NEAR-Shoemaker satellite Credit: NASA

"Images are great, but the main purpose of what were doing now is X-ray and Gamma-ray mapping," said Cheng. Such mapping, which involves measuring high-frequency waves that have been energized by the suns energy, can tell astronomers which elements exist on the surface of the asteroid.

Over the next three months, additional similar maneuvers will move NEAR-Shoemaker even further from Eros, from 62 to 124 miles (100 to 200 km). One area in particular that NEAR-Shoemaker hopes to study during this time will be the asteroids southern pole, which has been stuck in the shade in recent months due to seasonal positioning of the sun.

Project officials have noted, however, that the satellite is not finished with its close-range studies of Eros quite yet. In fact, NEAR-Shoemaker is scheduled to make a number of close flybys in the future, and may even touch the asteroids mysterious surface.

Launched from Cape Canaveral in 1996 from a Delta-2 rocket, the $224 million NEAR project has already returned a great deal of information about Eros, which lies more than 160 million miles (257 million kilometers) away from Earth. Renamed NEAR-Shoemaker after astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker, the mission is scheduled to continue through Valentines Day (February 14), 2001 exactly one year to the day after the probe first settled into orbit around Eros.