NEAR: The First Discovery Mission (Andrew Cheng)
Andrew Cheng is the chief scientist for the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He now serves as the department’s external liaison for space science and will provide independent science advice and strategic vision to lab and department leadership. Dr. Cheng brings considerable experience to the position, having been an interdisciplinary scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, a co-investigator on the Cassini mission to Saturn, and a scientist on the Japanese-led MUSES-C asteroid mission. He was project scientist for the historic Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, which was the first to orbit (and eventually land on) an asteroid.
Using six highly specialized instruments to gather data about its primary target, asteroid 433 Eros, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission was designed to answer many fundamental questions about the nature and origin of asteroids and comets. It was the first of NASA’s Discovery missions and the first mission ever to go into orbit around an asteroid. The ultimate goal of the mission was to rendezvous with and achieve orbit around Eros in January 1999 and study the asteroid for approximately one year. A problem caused an abort of the first encounter burn and the mission had to be rescoped for a December 1998 flyby of Eros and a later encounter and orbit on February 14, 2000. Prior to its encounter with Eros, NEAR flew within 1,200 km of the C-class asteroid 253 Mathilde in June 1997.
The NEAR mission is remembered as the first to orbit an asteroid successfully and also to land on one successfully, but those of us who lived NEAR (we did not just work on NEAR) remember it as both the best of times and the worst of times. Andrew Cheng will share recollections of the good and the bad, which have the common theme that the unexpected always happens.
Learn more about the Academy and PI Forums: http://appel.nasa.gov/knowledge-sharing/pi-team-masters-forums/
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