The first spacecraft to land on an asteroid has finally lost its connection with scientists on Earth.
The NEAR Shoemaker craft made an unexpectedly gentle landing on Eros on 12 February and continued to send back detailed information about the composition of the asteroid.
But NEAR needs solar power to communicate with Earth. Eros is now entering its winter season, and sunlight at the landing site is dimming. In a month鈥檚 time, there will be no light at all.
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Mission controllers at Johns Hopkins University in the US closed down the communications link with NEAR on 28 February. They say they may attempt to contact the craft again in two years. But after many months in temperatures as low as -146掳C, they are not hopeful of a response.
NEAR scientists have hailed the mission as an outstanding success. 鈥淭his mission has been successful far beyond what was in the original mission plan,鈥� says NEAR mission director Robert Farquhar of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
鈥淲e got the first images of a C-class asteroid when we added a flyby of asteroid Mathilde in 1997,鈥� Farquhar says. 鈥淲e added two low altitude series of passes over the ends of Eros this past October and January that gave us spectacular images from 2.7 kilometres above the surface; and we achieved the first landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid. All this at no extra cost.鈥�
Since landing on Eros, NEAR鈥檚 gamma ray spectrometer has sent back unprecedented data. 鈥淭his is the first gamma-ray experiment that has ever been done on the surface of a body other than Earth,鈥� says NASA鈥檚 Jacob Trombka.
NEAR was launched on 17 February 1996, and spent one year orbiting Eros. It sent back 10 times more data than originally planned, including more than 160,000 detailed images. Analysing the data fully will take years.
鈥淲e solved mysteries and we unveiled more mysteries,鈥� says Andrew Cheng of APL.
He adds: 鈥淣ow we鈥檙e sharing the data with scientists all over the world, to sort through and debate and hopefully to help us discover facts about Eros and our solar system that no one knows today.鈥�
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