NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker mission carried the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid, touching down on 433 Eros on 12 February 2001. The spacecraft had originally been designed to orbit and study Eros rather than land there.
NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. After completing its primary orbital mission, controllers attempted a carefully planned descent using the spacecraft’s cameras and propulsion system. The landing succeeded at low speed, and NEAR continued transmitting data from the asteroid’s surface for a short time.
The mission was named after planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker. It returned detailed information about Eros’s shape, density, surface composition, and geology. Japan’s Hayabusa later became the first mission to return asteroid samples to Earth, while NASA’s OSIRIS-REx returned samples from Bennu in 2023.