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Space Science

NEAR Touches Down on Eros 208

Posted by jamie from the lucky-starr-and-the-dark-tumbling-rock dept.
Every once in a while NASA does something amazing. Today they took a probe that was just supposed to orbit a rock the size of Manhattan, guided it down to the surface, reoriented the dish, and sent back a hello from ground zero. The NEAR Shoemaker mission site and its mirror are a little busy at the moment, but CNN's coverage is good, with simulated video, and actual photos from two hundred million miles up. Some engineers, and the operators at Johns Hopkins, must be awfully proud right about now.
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NEAR Touches Down on Eros More

NEAR Touches Down on Eros

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  • Re:Great!....but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Have they solved the problem of AIDS, sickness in general, malnutrition and hunger, poverty and on and on?

    And what have you been doing with your life?
    Have you solved the problem of AIDS, sickness in general, malnutrition and hunger, poverty and on and on?
    Perhaps you should give up anything that doesn't directly lead to soving these problems.

    It's not NASA's job to solve these problems. It IS their job to do nifty stuff in space.

  • Re:Incorrect Information! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The NEAR team has members from both NASA and Johns Hopkins. http://near.jhuapl.edu/intro/faq.html

  • Upside down... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They could land a non-lander, but they couldn't land the Mars Polar *Lander*.

  • Re:Bonus Science Indeed (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First off, you will not live to see the day that nano-probes mine asteroids. Not at the rate we're going.

    Secondly, the impact @5mph is enough to make it rebound off the asteroid again since its got only 1/1000G. If I had to guess I'd say it was on its way off the asteroid again fairly slowly. We'll have to see though.
  • We might wait for the israelis to find a salt lake in a valley and move in so we have someone to sell food to.
  • Funny, you insult Americans for not using a logical, sensible measurement system, and then you browbeat us for not using illogical, nonsensical English spellings. Given that many (most?) words have multiple meanings, it's inane to use different spellings to try and indicate meaning in just a few cases.

    Unfortunately, the Abell Spelling Reform (doubled vowel indicates the long form, x and c removed from the language, most double consonants eliminated, etc.) goes over like a lead balloon. (or perhaps I should say it "gooz oover liik a led baloon.")
  • that was tremendously funny. good post.

  • ... (Score:1)

    by Drake42 ( 4074 )
    The words anger management float through the air...
  • A meter is a guage

    Here in the US we spell it "gauge," but I'll assume we've screwed that up, too.

    A metre, on the other hand, is a unit of length (which I believe resides somewhere in Europe; France?)

    Anywhere that light and vacuum come together. Are you perhaps thinking of the kilogram, which is still based on a relic?

  • I take my hat off to the whole NASA crew, but I'll tell you the real hero is Robert Farquhar. He's the closest thing to as astrogater, not counting the ones on Star Trek, that we've got. He did remarkable work with ICE, the satellite which he managed to nudge at Halley's comet when the US couldn't be bothered to send up a real probe. Once more, he's managed to do the space equivalent of throwing a raw egg into the air and then catching it on an iron skillet--without breaking it. There's simply no one better at navigating in space.

    Steven
  • Maybe there *are* some rocket scientists working at NASA :-)
  • It's an hour later, and I got into the site just fine. So there was a spike.

    You're suggesting that Slashdot post this story when people don't want to talk about it? Like the guy looking for a quarter he dropped, only under the streetlight, "where the light's better"?
    ----
  • According to the updated CNN story [cnn.com], the NEAR craft is transmitting from the surface and they may even be able to get it to lift off again.

    I want these guys to build my next car.
  • Hmm, you're a bit harsh on the Anglo Saxons, their old system was pretty good, about three centuries ago.
    Funny thing is it was one of the first more-or-less standardised systems and now they have to use the METRIC system as a standard-reference since technology left the age of steam.....
    It's a pitty that strange delusions keep them from embracing the I.S. as the new standard.
  • I'm just saying we can view the "commonplace" activity with wonder and respect. The sun rises and sets every morning, and damn if it isn't an awe-inspiring thing to watch.
  • They keep making these things that just last and last and last.... Outdoing the Energizer bunny even. Looks like they did a great job with Eros/NEAR. Lets hope we get some really good data to work with from all this unexpected bonanza.
    -=-
  • right on mark... The ESA did send a mission to Halley, too.
  • CNN also has incorrect information. I have two pieces of evidence for this. First: Look at the homepage for the NEAR project. It's at Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Lab. Second, read this story [channel2000.com] at Channel2000.com. It also credits Johns Hopkins.
    --
    Matthew Walker
    My DNA is Y2K compliant
  • Heh. Well, first US deep space craft to be controlled by someone other than NASA. That better?
    --
    Matthew Walker
    My DNA is Y2K compliant
  • The satelite is NOT being run by NASA, it is being run by Johns Hopkins. In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.
    --
    Matthew Walker
    My DNA is Y2K compliant
  • Thanks for being polite and listening to me. I apologize for the someone... scathing tone of my initial post. I'm just in a bad mood cause I posted an article about this same news first thing this morning, with correct information and links, and it got rejected, after which they posted the article that didn't credit Johns Hopkins.
    --
    Matthew Walker
    My DNA is Y2K compliant
  • Heee. Hello, fellow fan of Ender's Game. The Buggers didn't establish that base till the Second Invasion though, so I think we're safe for now.
    --
    Matthew Walker
    My DNA is Y2K compliant
  • A tip of the hat to Rodgers & Hart:
    You're nearer, than my head is to my pillow,

    Nearer, than the wind is to the willow.
    [ . . . ]
    You're nearer, than the ivy to the wall is,
    Nearer, than the winter to the fall is.
    Leave me, but when you're away, you'll know,
    You're nearer, for I love you so!
  • What a great reason not to report about it!

    Twit.
  • You are so right. No more TV for you until you've cured AIDS and cooked dinner for Zaire.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
  • If ever there was a day to probe Eros, it would be Valentine's Day. If they'd waited two more days they would have done it.

    No romantics at NASA, I guess...

  • Despite past screwups by NASA (which I accept as a hazzard of space exploration), this makes me proud to call myself a geek. While I have nothing in common with the individuals involved in this project, and have never participated or been involved with anything on this scale - I know that we share at least a few things, notably curiosity, the drive to hack something that wasn't suppose to work that way, and pushing the limits of the hardware (and if landing an "unlandable" probe isn't pushing limits - nothing is).

    Damn proud... Kudos to those involved!

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • Actually, they do not succeed at all - they are too probable. However, when you get to one in a trillion-something chance (I am not sure about the exact numbers), the improbability drives start kicking in, and everything happens to be just fine! If you disagree, reread the Hitchhiker's guide [barnesandnoble.com]!!!
    ---------------------------------------- ---------
  • They should head out to an Italian bistro and work up the calculations for the next asteroid landing mission.

  • > even when it makes two years of mistakes up until that point. This is where the 'bunch of smart guys' quotent pays off.

    Limit the money and you also limit the number of pointy-haired bosses.
  • We're a multitasking nation.

    --

  • According to the BBC News website, the asteroid contains minerals worth approximately £2000bn. Given that it is one of millions of asteroids, and not a particularly big one at that, it's only a question of time before robotic mining of asteroids is a fact. No more strip mining the Earth (good for our environment), and removes asteroids from potential Earth collision courses (good for our survival as a species); someone just needs to develop the tech. Of course, all those minerals being dumped onto the world metal exchanges would totally crash the market, but I'm sure someone will work a way round that.
  • Read the discworld novels. when it's "a million-to-one chance, but it might just work" it will allways work, 999,999 to 1 or 1,000,001 to one don't it has to be exactly a million to one :)
    ---
  • WRT space junk and the ISS, I believe I read somewhere that NASA is working on a laser system to deflect potentially dangerous space junk away from the space station, so yes, I think they are concerned about it :-)
  • I go to Johns Hopkins, and they've been mighty proud of the NEAR craft since its inception. But I guess JHU has nothing to do with NEAR, since CNN doesn't say it does.
  • Screw "possible scientific research." This is awesome. The people at NASA didn't care about research, they just wanted to have some fun with their toy in its last moments, true to the hacker spirit
  • They didn't think this would work.

    Nice job!

  • If you claim that a given probe is supposed to land on the target celestial body, and it crashes, then you look really dumb and everyone questions your ability.

    But if you claim that you're trying to crash, and then you "manage" to land it perfectly, then suddenly everyone is impressed with your genuis...
  • In space, nothing is always stable and 100% predictable
    Only because it could get affected by an outside body. I'm not sure if that really counts as not being stable. I would call a block sitting on a table 'stable' even though I could come along and hit it to knock it off. This is something very different from the meaning of unstable that refers to a system who's balance is precarious so that the tiniest change will grow larger and larger in a feedback loop, so that it is nearly impossible for it to stay the way it is indefinately. (for example, a pencil standing straight up on its point.)
    The definition does not mean that the orbit is INSIDE the Earths
    That's not what he said. He said inside MARS orbit.
  • How many kids in schools and libraries are going to miss out on this story because of porn filters blocking on the word "Eros".
  • Lucky Starr, as in a series of stories by Paul French (aka Isaac Asimov). See http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/Asimov/Series.html
    for summaries.
  • I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well.

    Actually, the moon's almost completely out of the Earth's gravity well. The main energy cost for exporting lunar material is getting the material out of the _moon's_ gravity well, and this is pretty low (especially since lunar vacuum lets you build mass drivers and the like easily).

    It would be quite difficult to ship material from most asteriods (the ones in the belt) to Earth's location, because the great difference in GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy) from their different orbital radii about the _sun_. It could certainly be done; it's just probably more of a pain than using lunar material.

    For supplying Earth's surface, we're always better mining material from the crust. No expensive shuffling about required at all.

    Earth orbit is probably best supplied from the moon, though it'll be easier to ship stuff to higher orbits than lower (again, due to GPE).

    Still, it's nice to have direct confirmation that some asteroids in the neighbourhood are made of mineable materials. This will make it much easier to build bases on _them_ (or to transform them into gaggles of space stations).
  • I think you're confusing missions. IIRC, the Clementine lunar mission ended a few years ago with the spacecraft slamming into the surface in order to kick up dust, so that we could do a water composition analysis from Earth. I seem to recall that, even with hundreds of telescopes looking for it, we couldn't spot the plume.

    But a mission of this type would be highly improbable on Eros. Although it's a big asteroid, it's still just a small speck of light to Earth based telescopes. I don't think there's a telescope yet built that would have enough aperture to pick up a plume on its surface.
  • The term Near Earth Astroid does not mean they will impact Earth, but that the possibility is there since they come so close. In space you've got N bodies influencing eachother gravitationally. Eros orbit may appear stable, but all it would need is a random erratic body to pull it into a deadly course.
  • Go back and read the context in which I was making my statement. In other words, read the whole thread.

    I was not giving a definition of Near Earth, I was merely stating that his use of the term "stable" was wrong. In space, nothing is always stable and 100% predictable, especially when the object is small, like Eros, and has an oblong orbit. The definition does not mean that the orbit is INSIDE the Earths, its simply that its orbit INTERSECTS the Earth's plane.

    So not only are you wrong with your definition, but you also didn't bother to read the entire thread.
  • Yes kudos... Now can anyone tell me what the point was, besides taking pics on the way down? Does it serve any purpose on the surface of the asteroid?
  • Well... we could. Now the Chinese will.
  • viadd wrote:
    NEAR is a 'faster better cheaper' mission. The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade. NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid.

    I fully agree with this. faster-better-cheaper means more missions for the bucks. (Now, if they'd only have a little more flexibility on the budget, we could keep Pluto-Kuiper Express.)

    And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."

    This, however, isn't true. Indeed, they'd rather do an "orderly disposal" of a probe like Galileo than just shut it off, because at least a controlled disposal allows the opportunity for some science to be done. (The solar-system-exiting vehicles like Pioneer ... which may have at last gone quiet ... were kept alive because they could still do science just by reporting their position.) Last year a team studied Galileo's options [nas.edu], based on a collision with Jupiter or one of her four major satellites, with consideration of UN Outer Space Treaty prohibitions against accidental transfer of Earth organisms to those bodies. So far, though, they apparently haven't decided what to do.
    ----
  • This is very cool, but I wonder how long it will take for society to consider this an irresponsible act of space dumping, like dropping a jumbo jet into the Grand Canyon.
    Or will NEAR be loved and cherished, like an ancient Bolo tank (cf. Keith Laumer)?

    I wonder how safe the ISS will be from space junk. I know it's something NASA cares a lot about. I find it very humorous that the Cold War resources for tracking nuclear weapons now do a lot of space junk tracking.

    --

  • There could be buggers there. (Or should I be PC and say Formics?)

    --
  • The Gallileo Jupiter orbiter dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere when it arrived in the Jupiter system a few years back.
  • Every time NASA gets the shuttle up and back down is an amazing feat. Every time it trains the collective eye further out or further in is an amazing feat. It absolutely astounds me that people dismiss most of what they do as commonplace. I remember on the 20th anniversary of the moon landing I actually sat down and thought about what that meant and just about lost it. Sadly, most people seem to have been unimpressed not two years after that fact.
  • I hope some of you guys on the NEAR project are reading this.. I want to give you all a big *HUGGY* for your awesome work. Space travel has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. Reading news like this makes me feel young again and fills me with hope for the future.. not mine, but humanity. Cheers and rawk on!
  • If we can't find a bunch of movie stars to blow it up, maybe we can launch enough of them at it, at a high enough trajectory, that their impact can knock it back off course.

    Hmmm Celebrity Assisted Rail-Gun.... interesting possibilities.
  • Or could someone use it as a Trans-Terra data-cache? :)

    Sure latency will kill you, but I want to see the Feds/MPAA/RIAA try to raid THAT server.

  • Man, and think of the explosion the plasma (hot air) could produce ;)
  • From the CNN Coverage:
    Eros became only the fifth celestial body touched by a human spacecraft, following the Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter.

    How did we touch Jupiter? Does atmospheric brakeing count or something?

  • cool! (Score:2)

    by romco ( 61131 )
    You know some guy at nasa got to be shaking his head though....

    "We try to land on Mars and ended up with the world's most expensive lawn darts.

    We try to land a probe that was never suppost to land on a tiny rock and -poof- prefect landing."
  • They busted out their Apple II's and played Lunar Lander all weekend.

    ...and my parents thought that I was wasting time with it...
  • The satelite is NOT being run by NASA, it is being run by Johns Hopkins.

    This is more or less true. But APL is operating under NASA supervision.

    it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.

    This is false. APL has run several space missions [jhuapl.edu] previous to NEAR. My father [google.com] worked on FUSE [jhuapl.edu] and is now doing MSX. I wouldn't doubt it if other research labs did as well.

  • It's always nice to see talented, hardworking people confounding the skeptics. There's always someone waiting in the wings to point the finger and say "I told you so" when you screw up. In fact, they're often there saying, "Yeah, everyone knew it could be done - it's about time you did it" when you succeed.

    It's easy to take shots at someone else's work, but it can be damned difficult to make a complex project succeed.

    Kudos to the folks at Johns Hopkins and NASA for getting the job done.

  • The NEAR/Shoemaker gig was built and run out of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. I think NASA gets credit for not much more than funding this project.
  • Here's a de-spagettified link to CNN's best of EROS picture gallery [cnn.com] with little descriptions. Some of them are very cool.
  • FYI: I went back, and viewed the video today (Tuesday). I'm now getting a 34Kb stream (far better quality). I guess that the 12KB stream was because of heavy demand for the video (better a slow stream than no stream at all).
    --
  • As CNN says: Spacecraft may take off after landing on asteroid [cnn.com].

    Course, what else could it do if it stayed there? Take repeated pictures of the same spot? Makes sense.

    I say they pogo stick it around for a while...
  • NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?
  • The following is extracted from a story [space.com] at Space.com:
    Engineers at APL are looking at the prospects for relaunching the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft from the surface of asteroid Eros. A command is already built into the probe as it rests upon the space rock's surface.

    The liftoff from the asteroid is on tap for this Wednesday, roughly 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, according to David Dunham, NEAR's mission designer at APL. Dunham said the probe may rise upwards well over 1,300 feet (400 meters) above Eros. The spacecraft would then settle down to a new landing spot. "The whole thing is just more icing on the cake," Dunham said.

    NEAR Shoemaker was not designed specifically for the touchdown, with the daring dive called for as the mission drew to a successful close on February 14. When the spacecraft was launched February 17, 1996, its fuel tanks were filled with 715 pounds (325 kilograms) of fuel. After five years, exactly how much propellant remains is unknown. Precious bursts of fuel were needed to prod NEAR Shoemaker lower and lower to the surface of Eros....

  • In a word, no:

    Assume that Eros is a cylinder about a mile in diameter and 20 miles long. And made of rock (6g/cc). Multiply all that together, and I find that Eros weighs (roughly) 10^11 or so metric tons. Even if Eros weighed 1 metric ton, there is no chance that Eros would even notice....compared to a million years of solar wind and Jupiter perturbations, it is meaningless.

  • Telemetry operator: "Woohoo! It LANDED! It's even transmitting!"
    Systems controller: "Great! So what do we do now?"
    Boss-type guy: "Uhm... er... Well, we never really expected this to work, so... I guess we just go get drunk now"
    Systems controller: "What, we can't do anything with it now? Then what the hell did we spend all weekend practicing [slashdot.org] for?"
    Boss-type guy: "Well, it was a really good job guys, and everybody's really impressed, but we just don't have anything to do with it."
    Systems controller: "I'll be damned if I'm going home now! We've gotta find something to do with this thing!"
    Telemetry operator: "You know it still has a bit of fuel left."
    (Telemetry and Systems look at each other)
    Systems controller: "You don't think -"
    Telemetry operator: "Well why not?"
    Systems controller: "But it could never..."
    Telemetry operator: "It was never designed to land in the first place, but we pulled that off, didn't we?"
    Systems controller: "What the hell! Hey boss! We checked out the neighborhood, and it sucks. We're leaving."
    Boss-type guy: "Huh? Leaving? What the hell are you talking about?"
    Systems controller: "We decided that the view on the surface isn't half as cool as the one we had before, so we're going back to orbit."
    Boss-type guy: "But there's no way to do that! The odds of making it back to orbit are less tha"
    Systems controller, interrupting: "Never tell me the odds!"
    Boss-type guy: "Good point. You guys have fun, I'll go call CNN."
  • NOTE: This is 100% speculation, and probably mostly bullshit. But it's an interesting idea.

    The power source thing is a great idea, but it would be pretty hard to make it work on Earth. Any singularity kept around for long would accelerate at the good ol' 9.8 m/s^2, straight out of its containment. In microgravity, however, you could hold a small singularity in one place by feeding it from different directions if the matter you throw in is moving fast enough. Hawking radiation is mostly electrons and positrons, not directly gamma rays (the positrons usually end up as 511 keV gamma rays after meeting up with an electron, though). If you trap some of the positrons, along with any antiprotons you get, and feed the rest back into the singularity, you might be able to accumulate macroscopic quantities of antimatter after a long enough time. Unless singularities are particular about what particles they will emit, which is one thing that could be studied from nucleus-sized versions.

    So we just need to build an orbiting accelerator capable of energies several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can get on Earth, and we might be able to make lots of antimatter. No problem, right?

    I think we've strayed sufficiently far from the topic of the story, so I'll stop now.

  • Do not mistake "faster, lighter, cheaper" with poor engineering. The two are mutually exclusive. Any well engineered spacecraft should be able to fullfill some additional unknown criteria, despite it's cost.
  • We should be accepting such notions as space travel as commonplace. How else do you expect society to transition into a space-faring one?
  • Tres cool. Although I would say that "touch down" sounds a little gentle for 5km/h impact... maybe "bump down"? I can just imagine seeing it slowly fall to the surface, bounce once, kicking up a bunch of dust and pebbles, panels quivering as it settles down, slightly inclined but still online.

    I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well. I can't wait for nano-robot-dispensing probes: just drop them on an asteroid and wait a few years while they sort the atoms into piles...

    We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.

  • Now this is what I was talking about. High quality mineral deposits that could be easily used in constructing orbital platforms, space ships, etc.. I'm sure there would be a reason to bring some stuff back to Luna or Terra, but it would make sense to keep it up "high" in the gravity well... we might even send it off to other planets like Mars or the moons of Saturn and Jupiter for use there (again, either in orbit or on the surface).

    The money is there. Maybe my nano-robot vision is a little wishful, but miniaturized refining technology of some sort could be used to remotely mine comets, asteroids, and moons.

    It's a whole new frontier, just waiting for the first generation of prospectors. Having hiked the Chilcoot trail (of Yukon Gold Rush lore), I can tell you that people will do--and pay--almost anything for the chance to strike it rich.

    We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.

  • Please don't use metric measurements in this discussion. It has a tendancy to confuse NASA people.
  • NASA says that they weren't planning on placing a probe on Eros. "It just sort of happened," said NASA spokesman Bob Farquhar. "We don't normally do this kind of thing. It was the heat of the moment. NEAR had traveled about 2 billion miles, and Eros was looking so good. Please, Oh God, don't tell my wife."

    FULL TEXT [ridiculopathy.com]

  • NASA engineers, after suffering many unsuccessful landings with much more preparation, felt more than a little vindicated when the operation concluded successfully. "I was beginning to think that I just couldn't do it. I got used to saying, 'it's not you, Mars, it's me.'"

    NEAR stayed on the asteroid for a few hours, made breakfast and idle chit-chat. But after a while, he could tell that it was his time to go. Firing its reverse-thrusters, NEAR left the surface never to return. NASA engineers excitedly noted that the landing and take-off have prepared the asteroid for future landings.

    full text [ridiculopathy.com]

    satellite pr0n! [ridiculopathy.com]

  • ... that you can double check.
  • check this out http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/12/near.land ing.02/index.html it seems that their not happy with their luck on 1% odds. JHUAPL is now considering firing up the thrusters and lifting off Eros. Pretty amazing stuff. Congrats to the team who worked on this!
  • To give you a perspective of the situation... Consider if you will this basketball representing the earth, this grape the asteroid, and this grain of salt the represents the probe... Landing the probe on the astroid would be like trying to land this salt grain on the grape without any roll from 20 miles away with an error margin as thick as this piece of paper.
  • The NEAR team has members from both NASA and Johns Hopkins

    And I'll give a free nose goblin to anyone who can figure out who's in charge. The orgchart [jhuapl.edu] reads like a hedge maze.

  • george carlin fan....and your absolutely right. "near miss! bullsh*t! its a near hit!"
  • According to Fox News [foxnews.com] the NEAR was built under the 'faster, better, cheaper' philosophy. IMO, that philosophy doesn't mean that the craft are any less robust (generally, if a satellite payload survives launch, it's structurally sound enough to handle anything during spaceflight)... it just means that there are less 'bells and whistles' built in.
  • The computer on the NEAR runs VxWorks, from Wind River. VxWorks was also the first on another planet, controlling the Mars Pathfinder. And boy, isn't it cool that it worked?

  • Re:Did Mariner ever land on Mercury? (Score:3)

    by B.D.Mills ( 18626 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:55PM (#436925)
    Moon: Soviet probes were the first to hit the moon in the late fifties or early sixties. The first probe to hit the moon was simply to prove that the Soviets could hit the Moon. The British tracked this probe from Jodrell Bank and confirmed the hit.

    Mars: IIRC, The Russians were the first to land on Mars and send back an image, although the probe didn't work for long enough to send back a full picture. The American Viking probe touched down in 1976, sent back good images and conducted experiments to find life on Mars.

    Venus: The Russians landed a series of Venera probes on Venus in the 1970's. Magellan entered the atmosphere of Venus at the conclusion of its mission.

    Jupiter: The Galileo spacecraft sent a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter in 1995. The Galileo spacecraft itself is scheduled to enter the atmosphere of Jupiter at the conclusion of its mission, so as to avoid any chance of impacting with Europa and contaminating this potentially life-bearing world with microbes from Earth.

    Eros: NEAR-Shoemaker landed on Eros in February, 2001.

    Mercury: The only probe to have visited Mercury was a Mariner Venus-Mercury flyby in 1973. No spacecraft are known to have landed on Mercury.

    The next celestial body to have a spacecraft land on it will be Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, when the Huygens probe from the Cassini spacecraft arrives in 2004.

    --

  • They'd better watch Eros carefully . . . (Score:3)

    by Kreeblah ( 95092 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:07PM (#436926)
    . . . for signs of it blacking out. You never know when an insect-like race will suddenly decide to invade the solar system. What's the next step, building an orbiting schoolhouse for training soldiers?

  • some REAL video (Score:3)

    by Stephen Samuel ( 106962 ) <samuel.bcgreen@com> on Monday February 12, 2001 @07:20PM (#436927) Homepage Journal
    From the Discovery channel page on the giant Crystals, I found their Eros news item [discovery.com] which contains what seems to be a low-volume (12Kbit) 2 hour video [rbn.com] from NASA TV on the NEAR landing (seems to be a well-prepared "live" show, with lots of commentary. It appears to start with a random live feed (silent) from the control room, then it breaks into the more prepared show.

    For those of you arguing about microgravity: A tidbit from the video (I'm listening to /watching it, as I type this) Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats.
    --

  • Budget Problems (Score:3)

    by Digitalia ( 127982 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:02PM (#436928) Homepage
    For a craft that wasn't intended to land, or even survive for a prolonged period of time, this is incredible. It sort of makes you wonder about current NASA budget woes, though. If NASA is forced to switch to a "faster, lighter, cheaper" program, then opportunities like this will become more and more scarce. If the craft were only designed to handle the strict specs of the mission then it would be impossible for impromptu experimentation to take place. The cheap probes and landers would not be as likely to cope with a new situation should it appear. What if a once in a life time event were to occur? With cheaper probes, would it be lost to the scientific community?

  • Re:Budget Problems (Score:3)

    by Johnny Starrock ( 227040 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @02:50PM (#436929)
    So were the lost Mars probes.

  • More Good Stuff to Come. (Score:4)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:56PM (#436930) Homepage
    This is an outstanding achievement by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and they've certainly upped the competition with JPL et al.*

    But if you think this was great, just wait till you see what other missions JHUAPL has in store [jhuapl.edu].

    • Putting a finger in the solar wind with ACE.
    • Testing suborbital plasma jets with APEX.
    • Probing a comet nucleus with CONTOUR.
    • Mapping Mercury with MESSENGER.
    • Dual spacecraft imaging solar eruptions in 3D with STEREO.
    • ... and many more, some missions still active 27 years after launch.

    A number of these are excellent examples of the great, focussed science experiments that can be done under the faster-better-cheaper paradigm, and they're even competing for slots in the slightly more expensive Mid-Explorer program.

    *It should be noted in fairness that NEAR itself had a glitch; in December 1998 they failed to make their planned orbit insertion [agiweb.org], and had to circle the sun 14 months before another approach could be made. (At that time I'm sure many /. posters were blaming NASA for yet another failure! Indeed the faster-better-cheaper policy was being severely criticized.)
    ----

  • Of course it was a /joint/ operation... (Score:4)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:10PM (#436931)
    they had to be smoking something to come up with:
    "Hey man, let's land this thing!"
    ---

  • NASA has some videos of Eros (Score:4)

    by SpanishInquisition ( 127269 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @11:58AM (#436932) Homepage Journal
    I wonder if people with censorware will be able to see them.

  • Top 10 ways to land on an Asteroid (Score:4)

    by Lexicus9 ( 219546 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:54PM (#436933)
    10. Approach one stuck in the event horizon.
    9. "Rocket Jump" from a near by Quake3 map.
    8. Use the force to move the Asteroid under your feet.
    7. Surf to "http://www.howtolandanastroid.com" and click "final stages, turn or burn"
    6. Wait till one hits the earth and just jump on top of it.
    5. Tuck and roll.
    4. Pray that the Asteroid's gravity plane actually exists.
    3. Go out to sea and find some oil workers... they have a strange 6th sense about Asteroids.
    2. Review page 456b of the Star Command Manual.
    1. Think, "There is no asteroid."

  • If you're going to correct something ... (Score:5)

    by Bearpaw ( 13080 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:23PM (#436934)
    The satelite is NOT being run by NASA, it is being run by Johns Hopkins.

    It's a joint operation. Lots of other folks involved, too. See their mission page [jhuapl.edu].

    In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.

    How are you defining "deep space craft"? The Soviets sent missions to Mars and Venus (and the Comet Halley).

  • Re:Quick Question... (Score:5)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:22PM (#436935) Homepage
    smitty asks:
    NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?

    Well, you've hit on the problem.

    First, NASA's budget was well-spent. The NEAR mission completed all of its objectives (despite a "near-miss" on the first approach to the asteroid -- so even this mission wasn't perfect!). The funding runs out on Feb. 14, so this is the last opportunity to do anything. The impact objective seemed the best way to make use of that time.

    Second, the real constraint on the various probes we have traversing the solar system is money -- both for control teams, and for the Deep Space Network. The control team for NEAR will disband and go on to other projects, some together, some separately. (I can't wait to see what Johns Hopkins does next.) For quick check-ins with "defunct" probes like Pioneer, the teams are long dispersed and are assembled ad-hoc from veterans and current controllers. Somebody has to pay these people, though some of them would clearly work for free, and support the control center and connectivity.

    Third, the Deep Space Network is pretty much always maxed out. It's a limited resource, and projects get time on it in a sort of auction. Time spent collecting data from a dormant, completed project like NEAR is time taken away from active, valuable projects like Cassini and Mars Global Surveyor.

    Could amateurs build their own alt-DSN? Technically I imagine it would be possible -- buy up a couple of sold-off Cold War dish stations on the cheap -- but the problem is that the NEAR spacecraft is designed to broadcast at certain frequencies, and those would still interfere with existing DSN communications. Thus the spacecraft, if it continues to survive, will be commanded to suspend communications. I don't know if NEAR has any capability to change its communications parameters enough for an alternate station network to talk to it.
    ----

  • Ex-cellent! (Score:5)

    by hugg ( 22953 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:16PM (#436936)
    Awesome job! I wonder -- even though the satellite is officially "not designed to land", the engineers involved kept it in the back of their minds while designing and made tiny adjustments to make it at least possible. The guys at JPL did this for the Voyager missions, making the "grand tour" possible even though Congress initially only gave the go-ahead for a Jupiter/Saturn tour.

  • Re:Budget Problems (Score:5)

    by sdamberger ( 28313 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:12PM (#436937)
    NEAR is one of the "faster, lighter, cheaper" programs.

  • Don't laugh too hard, they're not done. (Score:5)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:06PM (#436938)
    Every once in a while, NASA does something amazing.

    Amazing step 1: land non-lander on Eros

    Amazing step 2: use same non-lander to carve Eros into giant erotic sculpture.

    Amazing result 1: Public interest in space increases by 3000%, as do NASA's budget and high-power telescope sales.

    Amazing result 2: New "child safe" digital telescopes that won't point at Eros (or Venus, after the finish that project).
    ---

  • Two sides to every coin... (Score:5)

    by GoNINzo ( 32266 ) <GoNINzo@@@yahoo...com> on Monday February 12, 2001 @12:07PM (#436939) Journal
    There were several possible outcomes to this landing (which BottomQuark [bottomquark.com] reported on earlier today.) You had the possibility that the possibility that the space craft could land at the 1mph-8mph landing speed that would allow it to survive. You had the chance that it would roll over onto it's antenae and not transmit anything. You had the chance it would hit so hard that scientists would be able to tell the asteroid's composition from the impact. However, today's landing at 5 mph was excellent and shows that NASA does know what's it's doing. sometimes. even when it makes two years of mistakes up until that point. This is where the 'bunch of smart guys' quotent pays off. `8r)

    There are some signs of bad science on the CNN site though. I don't believe Eros is in danger of hitting the earth because it has a stable orbit. I hate it when the news over-exagerates dangers, such as when the researcher from the RHIC [bnl.gov] said there is a small possibility of a black hole being created. Because of that, everyone was sure a giant movie-like black hole would be created at Brookhaven. Next, we'll be hearing that the NEAR landing might have pushed the rock off course, allowing it to hit the earth and destroy everything.

    Just hope we can find a bunch of movie stars to quickly blow it up!

    --
    Gonzo Granzeau

  • Get this guy on my team in Quake 3! (Score:5)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @01:39PM (#436940) Homepage
    Anyone who can land that satellite that well with that kind of lag, I want on my team.

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