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NASA's Discovery Program begins as the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft lifts off on the first mission ever to orbit and land on an asteroid, 433 Eros.
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NASA
American space and aeronautics agency
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the United States's civil space program, aeronautics research and space research. Established in 1958, it succeeded the National Advisory Committee for…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Discovery Program
Solar system exploration program by NASA
The Discovery Program is a series of Solar System exploration missions funded by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through its Planetary Missions Program Office. The cost of each mission is capped at a lower level than missions from NASA's New…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
NEAR Shoemaker
American space probe to asteroid (1996–2001)
Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker, renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
433 Eros
Near-Earth asteroid
433 Eros is a stony asteroid of the Amor group, and the first discovered, and second-largest near-Earth object. It has an elongated shape and a volume-equivalent diameter of approximately 16.8 kilometers. Visited by the NEAR Shoemaker space probe in 1998, it became the first…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)