The NASA Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft has entered a lower, 200km (125 miles), orbit around the asteroid Eros after two orbit correction manoeuvres.
Next month NASA hopes to conduct a third short engine burn, moving the spacecraft into a 100km orbit. By May, the NEAR will be moved as close as 50km to Eros where it will remain for several months.
It will then be manoeuvred into a deeper orbit as part of the comprehensive imaging and monitoring by the pathfinding craft, which became the first to go into orbit around an asteroid on 14 February.
Towards the end of the year, the NEAR's orbit will again be reduced to enable it to fly within a few kilometres of the surface, possibly even touching it, at very slow speed, creating a "divot" in its surface.
The NEAR also carries an X-ray and gamma-ray spectrometer, to map the elemental composition of the asteroid and a laser altimeter.
Images taken so far show evidence of a layered structure, which may indicate that the 33km-diameter asteroid is a remnant of a larger parent body that broke apart. The images also show a higher density of craters than observed during the fly-bys of another main-belt asteroid, Gaspra, by the NASA Galileo spacecraft in 1991.
Galileo also made a fly-by of the asteroid Idar in 1993, which NEAR made a fly-by of asteroid Mathilde in June 1997.
Source: Flight International
