23 January 1998  

NEAR COMPLETES FLAWLESS EARTH SWINGBY

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft flew by the Earth this
morning, "right on schedule and right on target," says a jubilant Thomas Coughlin,
Space Programs Manager at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL), which manages the NEAR mission. All spacecraft subsystems
worked flawlessly as NEAR swooped around the Earth during a 2-hour visit for a
gravity assist that put it onto the correct trajectory for a Jan. 10, 1999, encounter
with asteroid 433 Eros.

The Jan. 22-23 swingby put the United States on watch for its first naked-eye
glimpse of an interplanetary spacecraft. The southern states from east to west, and
especially Hawaii, got the best view because of clear skies and darkness that made
it easier to see sunglints off the spacecraft's four solar panels. Although
closest-encounter data is still being processed, early indications are that NEAR
passed within 336 miles of southwest Iran, as predicted. (Encounter data will be
posted on the NEAR Web page as soon as it is available.)

The first sighting of NEAR was made at about 1:30 p.m. EST, by an astronomer
in Caussols, France, using a 0.9 meter telescope, as the spacecraft approached far
above the Middle East. When sighted, NEAR was 580,000 miles from Earth and
within a half-mile of its expected location.

Data captured by NEAR instruments will start coming in to the APL Mission
Operations Center in Laurel, Md., about 8 p.m., this evening, says Mark
Holdridge, Mission Operations Director, and scientists expect to release the first
images from the swingby on Monday, Jan. 26.

Today NEAR is taking a series of images of Asia, Africa and Antarctica as it pulls
away from Earth. The images will be combined to make a "movie" documenting
the spacecraft's visit. For the next week NEAR's Multi-Spectral Imager and its
Near-Infrared Spectrograph will be calibrated using proven measurements of Earth
and moon geological features. On Feb. 6 the last of the instruments will be turned
off. Over the next year as NEAR closes in on Eros scientists and engineers will be
developing and testing flight and ground software for the spacecraft and finalizing
procedures for the yearlong encounter with the asteroid.

NEAR's study of Eros will be the first in-depth examination of a near-Earth
asteroid and is expected to yield information that will help scientists better
understand the evolution of our solar system. NEAR, which is being tracked by
NASA's Deep Space Network, is the first mission in the Space Agency's
Discovery series.