The spacecraft landed safely on the surface of the asteroid at 15:07 (2007 GMT), just three minutes off schedule.

"I am happy to report that the NEAR spacecraft has touched down on the surface of Eros," announced Farquhar, of the University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, outside Washington.

"This is the first time that the spacecraft has landed on a small body," Farquhar said, as pictures of the event began filtering in.

"We are still getting some signal so evidently it's still transmitting from the surface itself," he said.

Touchdown procedures, which lasted roughly four and a half hours, began at 10:31 local time (1531 GMT). The spacecraft had been orbiting Eros at 35 kilometers (22 miles) altitude.

Asteroid 433 Eros, named after the Greek god of love, is 33 kilometers (21 miles) long and 13 kilometers (8 miles) in diameter, and lies 316 million kilometers (196 million miles) from earth.

The successful touchdown is the first time in the history of space exploration that a spacecraft has landed on an asteroid. [It is also the first time the US has landed or crashed on a planetary body first - Editor].

NEAR Shoemaker had been orbiting Eros for a year and during that time collected 10 times more data than originally expected during its five-year, two billion-mile, 223-million-dollar mission.

With the craft almost out of fuel, its final approach toward the asteroid it had long gazed at -- not originally planned as part of the mission -- is "bonus science," according to Farquhar.

"It might not be a very soft touchdown. The unknown nature of the surface makes it hard to predict what will happen to the spacecraft, especially since it wasn't designed to land," Farquhar had said earlier.

During its year-long orbit of the asteroid, NEAR transmitted some 160,000 images of the rocky surface. NEAR was to touch down in an area of particular interest to scientists: largely-crater free but marked by large rocks and furrows.

Asteroids -- material left over from the formation of the solar system -- are rocky and metallic objects that orbit the Sun but are too small to be considered planets.

Because asteroids are material from the very early solar system, scientists are interested in their composition.

Eros, for example, is believed to contain magnesium, silicate and aluminum.

Before 1991 the only information obtained on asteroids was that which could be observed from Earth. In October 1991, the Galileo spacecraft whizzed by 951 Gaspra, taking the first high-resolution images of an asteroid.

In August 1993 Galileo made a close encounter with asteroid 243 Ida. Both Gaspra and Ida, like Eros, are classified as S-type asteroids composed of metal-rich silicates (stone).

On June 27, 1997, NEAR, although not designed for flyby encounters, made a high-speed close encounter with asteroid 253 Mathilde, granting scientists the first close-up look of a carbon-rich C-type asteroid.

All rights reserved. � 2001 Agence France-Presse. All information displayed on this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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