The craft has been orbiting the potato-shaped body for the last year. The proposed Feb. 12 landing, which was not part of the plan when the craft was launched in 1996, would be the first on an asteroid. Called 433 Eros, the asteroid is about 21 miles long and 8 miles wide and is one of thousands that orbit the sun, along with the planets of our solar system. He put the chances of a soft landing at 1 percent, but he said that even if the spacecraft crashed, cameras on board should get some detailed, close-up shots on the way down. With the Mars Polar Lander's embarrassing and mysterious demise in December 1999, the space agency may be reluctant to risk a failure.
Scientists find asteroids interesting for several reasons.
Because asteroids are thought to be made of the primordial building blocks of our solar system, they could bring insights into its early history, when these rocks, along with ice and dust, were getting swept up into planets. If humans have not already gone extinct by then, they might want to try to deflect such a collision. To do that, they will need to know the density and chemical composition of the asteroids and whether they are solid rocks or lumps of sand and gravel. Eros is about 160 million miles away, but its elliptical orbit brings it within 12 million miles of Earth's orbit, making it a near-earth asteroid. As the first mission to orbit one of these bodies, NEAR has revealed all sorts of strange and mysterious features, geologist Joe Veverka of Cornell University said.