The United States will launch the first spacecraft to orbit around an asteroid in 1996, Johns Hopkins University said Wednesday.
The spacecraft will orbit the asteroid Eros, which will be about 230 million miles from Earth at the time of the rendezvous, scheduled for December 1998.The goal of the mission, known as the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), is to measure the asteroid and study characteristics such as its composition, geology and magnetic fields, the university's Applied Physics Laboratory said in a statement.
"NEAR promises important new clues to scientific mysteries such as the nature of planetesimals, the building blocks for terrestrial planets; the orgin of objects that impact the Earth, and the fundamental relationship between asteroids, comets and meteorites," it said.
The spacecraft is to be launched in February 1996 and is to orbit Eros for up to a year from an altitude as low as 15 miles.
Eros, one of the largest and most closely studied of a group of bodies known as near-Earth asteroids, is irregularly shaped. Its dimensions are about 22 by 9 by 8 miles, the university said.
The spacecraft will be built and operated by the Johns Hopkins laboratory for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is to be the first U.S. space mission conducted by a non-NASA space center.
The flight will be the initial mission of NASA's low-budget Discovery program, which aims at small-scale, cost-effective space exploration, Johns Hopkins said.
It said initial funding of $66.2 million for the mission was approved by Congress in October.
"This mission will answer many long-standing scientific questions about asteroids and it will do it far more cost effectively than we could have done in the past," said William Piotrowski, NASA's acting director of solar system exploration.