[meteorite-list] History-Making NEAR Navigators Win Award

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:50:27 2004
Message-ID: <200204170125.SAA12494_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Contact: Martha J. Heil (818) 354-0850
          
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 16, 2002

HISTORY-MAKING NAVIGATORS WIN AWARD

The team that made history last year by navigating a
spacecraft to a remarkably safe landing on an asteroid
received a laureate prize today from Aviation Week & Space
Technology magazine.

Dr. Bobby G. Williams of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., accepted the laureate's award
for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission navigation
team at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D. C.

"Working on the project has been the high point of my career,"
said Williams. "A maneuver like this had never been done
before - our team had to go back to school and rethink the
way we do things."

On February 12, 2001, the spacecraft was coaxed into a soft
landing on the surface of asteroid Eros. "The feat of landing
on a body with only one-thousandth of Earth's gravity was all
the more remarkable given that the spacecraft was not designed
to land at all, " said James Asker, Washington bureau chief
for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.

The team included navigators from both JPL and the mission's
managing center, Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory,
Laurel, Md. Besides landing the spacecraft, the navigation
team recorded many firsts, accomplishments that will be
recounted in the April 29, 2002 issue of Aviation Week &
Space Technology.

In addition to navigating the first spacecraft to come close
to and orbit around an asteroid, the navigation team also
added orbits that were not part of the original plan, once
brushing by the asteroid just 2.7 kilometers (about 1.7 miles)
from the surface so that scientists could get more data about
the space rock.

The JPL navigation team included James K. Miller, Peter J.
Antreasian, Cliff E. Helfrich, William M. Owen, Jr., Eric
Carranza, Steven R. Chesley, Tseng-Chan Wang, Jon D. Giorgini,
and John J. Bordi.

More information on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission
is available at

http://near.jhuapl.edu/

Launched on Feb. 17, 1996, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
mission was the first in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost
planetary missions. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory designed and built the spacecraft. The mission team
includes members from JPL as well as Cornell University, Ithaca,
N.Y.; University of Maryland, College Park; Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Arizona,
Tucson; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
Space Environment Center, Boulder, Colo.; NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; NASA's Solar Data Analysis Center,
Greenbelt, Md.; Malin Space Science Systems Inc., San Diego, Calif.;
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas.; Northwestern
University, Evanston, Ill.; University of California, Los Angeles;
Catholic University, Washington, D.C.; Computer Sciences Corporation,
El Segundo, Calif.; and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry,
Mainz, Germany.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology,
manages many space missions for NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington D.C.

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Received on Tue 16 Apr 2002 09:25:17 PM PDT