The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, 1997

Even before the present Administrator of NASA, Daniel Goldin, made the phrase 'better, faster, cheaper' the slogan of at least the Office of Space Science, that same office under the Associate Administrator of Lennard Fisk and its Division of Solar System Exploration under the direction of Wes Huntress had begun a series of planetary spacecraft whose developmental cost, phase CID in the parlance of the trade, was to be held to under $150M. In order to get the program underway rapidly they chose two missions without the open solicitation now the hallmark of the program. One of these two missions, JPL' s Mars Pathfinder, was to be a technology demonstration mission with little immediate science return that would enable later high priority science missions to Mars. Many of the science investigations that were included had significant foreign contributions to keep NASA's cost of the mission within the Discovery budget. The second of these missions and the first to be launched was the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, or NEAR, awarded to Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. This mission was quite different than Mars Pathfinder, being taken from the list of high priority objectives of the science community and emphasizing the science return and not the technology development of the mission. This mission was also to prove to be well under the $150M phase CID cap.

Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous: Mission Overview.- Multi-Spectral Imager on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission.- Near Infrared Spectrometer for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission.- The X-Ray/Gamma-Ray Spectrometer on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission.- The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Laser Altimeter.- Near Magnetic Field Investigation, Instrumentation, Spacecraft Magnetics and Data Access.- The Near Science Data Center.

This book describes the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, its instruments, investigation plans and data center. It contains a complete description of the first launch of NASA's Discovery missions, a series of low-cost planetary missions. The NEAR spacecraft flew by the asteroid 253 Mathilde in June, 1997 on its way to rendezvous with the asteroid 433 Eros in January, 1999. The instruments described include the multispectral imager by S. E. Hawkins and colleagues, the near-infrared spectrometer by J. W. Hawkins and colleagues, the X-ray and gamma-ray spectrometer by J. O. Goldsten and colleagues, the laser altimeter by T. D. Cole and colleagues, and the magnetometer by D. A. Lohr and colleagues. K. Heeres concludes the book with a discussion of the NEAR Science Data Center. This book