Archive of Astronomy Questions and Answers

Will NASA be sending a spacecraft to fly by an asteroid soon?

In a previous question in one of the other sections, a reader asked much the same question, and I replied that there was a Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby ( CRAF) mission that was scheduled for the end of the 1990's, but which was canceled by Congress in the mid-1990's. Since then, a new smaller mission called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous It intercepted asteroid 433 Eros in 1999 and went into orbit around it to study it with a battery of imagers and other instruments. There are some great pictures of the surface of Eros. The above image is a closeup only a few miles across, and you can see boulders 30 yards across. The asteroid's surface is a grab bag of geological terrains. The above image shows crater erosion and no smaller craters, but what mechanism can smooth a rocky surface without an atmosphere? Stay Tuned!!

The Department of Defence, by the way, was also planning to send a small spacecraft called 'Clementine 2' to flyby an asteriod and shoot at it to see if its path could be diverted even by an inch, but the US Senate killed the mission in June, 1996.