On this day in space! June 27, 1997: NEAR Shoemaker flies by asteroid Mathilde

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On June 27, 1997, NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft flew by an asteroid named 253 Mathilde.

On June 27, 1997, NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft flew by an asteroid named 253 Mathilde. NEAR, which stands for Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, launched in 1996 to go orbit another asteroid named 433 Eros, and it flew by Mathilde along the way.

The spacecraft was hibernating in a low-power state for nearly 16 months before the mission's scientists woke it up to look at Mathilde. It whizzed by the asteroid going over 22,000 mph and came within 750 miles of its surface.

NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft flew by asteroid 253 Mathilde on June 27, 1997. (Image credit: NASA/NEAR Shoemaker)

The flyby lasted about 25 minutes, and the spacecraft took hundreds of photos along the way – enough to image 60 percent of the asteroid's surface.

Scientists were stoked about the quality of the images from this super-fast flyby. They found that Mathilde had a super lumpy and irregular shape, and with a totally battered surface, this asteroid likely had a violent history of collisions with other rocky objects floating around the solar system.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.