Near Spacecraft Flight System Performance

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft was built and launched in 29 months. After a 4-year cruise phase the spacecraft was in orbit about the asteroid Eros for 1 year, which enabled the science payload to return unprecedented scientific data. A summary of spacecraft in-flight performance, including a discussion of the December 1998 aborted orbit insertion burn, is provided. Several minor hardware failures that occurred during the last few years of operations are described. Lessons learned during the cruise phase led to new features being incorporated into several in-flight software uploads. The added innovative features included the capability for the spacecraft to autonomously choose a spacecraft attitude that simultaneously kept the medium-gain antennas pointed at Earth while using solar pressure to control system momentum and a capability to combine a propulsive momentum dump with a trajectory correction maneuver. The spacecraft proved flexible, reliable, and resilient over the 5-year mission.