Mission controllers have given NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous craft a
10-day reprieve.
Communications with the car-sized probe, which survived a
6-kilometre-per-hour touchdown on the Eros asteroid, should have been ended last
week.
But the soft landing and favourable positioning of the solar panels means a
gamma-ray spectrometer on board can still be activated to measure the
composition of the asteroid from a few inches away, rather than a few miles.
