Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission: mission and targets

Project start

February 17, 1996

Declared end

February 28, 2001

The start the archive declares is the start of the project, not the launch, and an end it does not declare does not mean the mission is still running.

Targets you can open in 3D:

• Eros
• Earth
• Moon

A declared target is what the archive files the mission’s data under, not a record of observation.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission to the near-earth asteroid 433 Eros was launched in Feb. 1996 and carried out Eros orbital operations from Feb. 2000 through Feb. 2001. It acquired the first comprehensive, spatially resolved measurements of the geomorphology, reflectance spectral properties, and shape of an asteroid, and X-ray and gamma-ray spectral measurements of elemental abundances from orbit and the surface. The ambient magnetic field in the vicinity of Eros was also measured. On the way to Eros, the spacecraft also performed a flyby of the asteroid 253 Mathilde in June 1997, obtaining image data and a mass determination.

Quoted in English, as the archive publishes it, read on October 4, 2026.

• 253 Mathilde (asteroid)
• C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) (comet)
• Interplanetary Magnetic Field (magnetic field)
• Solar System (planetary system)

Identifier in the archive, which is its citation: urn:nasa:pds:context:investigation:mission.near_earth_asteroid_rendezvous

NASA Planetary Data System, PDS Registry, investigation context products. Dates and targets read on September 29, 2026; how to cite the archive: https://pds.nasa.gov/datastandards/citing/

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