Two days after touchdown, NEAR Shoemaker is still in communication with the NEAR team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD.

Earlier this week, the team sent commands to NEAR and guided the robotic researcher to a 4-miles-per-hour touchdown on a rock-strewn plain on the asteroid. The spacecraft gently hit the surface at 3:02 p.m. EST, after a journey of 2 billion miles, and a full year in orbit, around the large space rock.

Yesterday, the NEAR mission operations team decided against another engine firing that could have lifted the space probe off the asteroid's surface. There were initial concerns that it might be necessary to adjust the spacecraft's orientation in order to receive telemetry from the ground.

However, NEAR Shoemaker landed with a favorable orientation, and there is no problem with receiving information. Mission managers have decided it is not necessary to move the spacecraft from its resting place on the surface of Eros.

During Wednesday's press conference, Robert Farquhar, NEAR mission director at John Hopkins University, said, "it didn't make any sense to attempt another liftoff. We didn't have enough fuel left and it would take too long to lock on again with the high gain antenna. The spacecraft is happy there on the surface."

"We put the first priority on getting high-resolution images of the surface and the second on putting the spacecraft down safely - and we got both," said Farquhar. "This could not have worked out better."

Mission operators say the touchdown speed of less than 4 miles per hour (between 1.5 and 1.8 meters per second) may have been one of the slowest planetary landings in history. They also have a better picture of what happened in the moments after the landing: What they originally thought was the spacecraft bouncing may have been little more than short hop or "jiggle" on the surface; the thrusters were still firing when the craft hit the surface, but cut off on impact; and NEAR Shoemaker came down only about 650 feet (200 meters) from the projected landing site.

"It essentially confirmed that all the mathematical models we proposed for a controlled descent would work," says Dr. Bobby Williams, NEAR navigation team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "You never know if they'll work until you test them, and this was like our laboratory. The spacecraft did what we expected it to do, and everyone's real happy about that."

NEAR Shoemaker snapped 69 detailed pictures during the final three miles (five kilometers) of its descent, the highest resolution images ever obtained of an asteroid. The camera delivered clear pictures from as close as 394 feet (120 meters) showing features as small as one centimeter across. The images also included several things that piqued the curiosity of NEAR scientists, such as fractured boulders, a football-field sized crater filled with dust, and a mysterious area where the surface appears to have collapsed.

"These spectacular images have started to answer the many questions we had about Eros," says Dr. Joseph Veverka, NEAR imaging team leader from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., "but they also revealed new mysteries that we will explore for years to come."

NEAR Shoemaker launched on Feb. 17, 1996 - the first in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, scientifically focused planetary missions - and became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid on Feb. 14, 2000. The car-sized spacecraft gathered 10 times more data during its orbit than originally planned, and completed all the mission's science goals before Monday's controlled descent.

"NEAR has raised the bar," says Dr. Stamatios M. Krimigis, head of the Applied Physics Laboratory's Space Department. "The Laboratory is very proud to manage such a successful mission and work with such a strong team of partners from industry, government and other universities. This team had no weak links - not only did we deliver a spacecraft in 26 months, we were ready to launch a month early, and that efficiency continued through five years of operations. This is what the Discovery Program is designed to do."

Funding for the mission extension will come from the NEAR project.

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