English: Artist's rendering, from NASA, of the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft, in mission configuration. Originally christened the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, its mission was to investigate Near-Earth objects (NEOs), performing a flyby of the asteroid 253 Mathilde in 1997, and the very first in-orbit study of an asteroid in 1998 at 433 Eros. The mission was the first launched in the Discovery Program series of low-cost missions sanctioned by NASA.