NEAR-Shoemaker to 'Smack Into' Eros

streampipe writes "NASA's asteroid-orbiting NEAR-Shoemaker satellite has essentially completed it's mission, and scientists will attempt to land the craft onto Eros on February 12th in an attempt to squeeze some 'bonus science' out of the orbiter...story at CNN." NASA's pretty good at smacking probes into other objects - this target is a little smaller than, say, Mars, but I predict a solid hit. :)

Comments

Landing is only a very slight possibility

[Nos.]

Our primary purpose is not to land. Our primary purpose is to get to a very low altitude to take high resolution pictures

They just want to get very close to the asteroid and send back as many pictures of the asteroid before it crashes. There's a 1% chance of it surviving the landing, even though that's what the article summary seems to say they're planning on doing.

As a NIST engineer once said...

[SuperJ]

...if it doesn't fall apart after taking the last data point, you've overengineered it.