Donald Savage 
Headquarters, Washington, DC                   March 14, 2000
(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 
(Phone: 240/ 228-7536)

RELEASE:  00-38

NASA RENAMES NEAR SPACECRAFT FOR 
PLANETARY SCIENCE PIONEER GENE SHOEMAKER 

     The NASA satellite conducting the first-ever close-up study 
of an asteroid will be renamed to honor Dr. Eugene M. Shoemaker, a 
legendary geologist who influenced decades of research on the role 
of asteroids and comets in shaping the planets. The Near Earth 
Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, currently orbiting asteroid 
433 Eros more than 145 million miles from Earth, will now be known 
as NEAR Shoemaker. 

     "Gene Shoemaker was an inspirational, charismatic pioneer in 
the field of interplanetary science," said Dr. Carl B. Pilcher, 
Director of Solar System Exploration at NASA Headquarters, 
Washington, DC. Pilcher announced the new name today during the 
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. "It is a 
fitting tribute that we place his name on the spacecraft whose 
mission will expand on all he taught us about asteroids, comets 
and the origins of our solar system. " 

     Shoemaker died in a 1997 car accident in the Australian 
outback while on an annual study of asteroid impact craters. With 
his wife and research partner, Carolyn, Shoemaker was part of the 
leading comet discovery team of the past century, perhaps most 
famous for finding the comet (Shoemaker-Levy 9) that broke up and 
collided with Jupiter in 1994. 

     He was an expert on craters and the impacts that caused them. 
Shoemaker's work on the nature and origin of Meteor Crater in 
Arizona in the 1960s laid the foundation for research on craters 
throughout the solar system. He also established the lunar 
geological time scale that allowed researchers to date the 
features on the moon's surface. 

     Though he never realized his dream of tapping a rock hammer 
on the moon, Shoemaker taught Apollo astronauts about craters and 
lunar geology before they left Earth. Last year, when NASA's Lunar 
Prospector spacecraft crashed on the Moon in an experiment at the 
end of its mission, a small vial of Shoemaker's ashes, carried 
aboard the spacecraft, was scattered on the lunar surface. 

     Shoemaker was a key member of the 1985 working group that 
first studied the NEAR mission, defining its science objectives 
and designing a conceptual payload. Many of the group's 
recommended instruments were included in the actual spacecraft, 
which only a month into its yearlong orbit of Eros is already 
returning fascinating data on the asteroid's surface and geology. 

     The first in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost planetary 
missions, NEAR launched from Cape Canaveral Air Station, FL, on 
Feb. 17, 1996. After a four-year journey that included flybys of 
Earth (Jan. 1998) and asteroids Mathilde (June 1997) and Eros 
(Dec. 1998), NEAR began orbiting Eros on Feb. 14, 2000. The car-
sized spacecraft will observe the asteroid from various distances 
-- coming within several miles of the surface -- before the 
mission ends in February 2001. The Johns Hopkins University 
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD, designed and built the 
NEAR spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space 
Science.