Editing NEAR Shoemaker (section)

===Failure of first attempt at orbital insertion===
The first of four scheduled rendezvous burns was attempted on December 20, 1998, at 22:00 UT. The burn sequence was initiated but immediately aborted. The spacecraft subsequently entered [[safe mode (spacecraft)|safe mode]] and began tumbling. The spacecraft's [[Rocket engine|thrusters]] fired thousands of times during the anomaly, which expended 29&nbsp;kg of propellant, reducing the program's propellant margin to zero. This anomaly almost resulted in the loss of the spacecraft due to a lack of solar orientation and subsequent battery drain. Contact between the spacecraft and mission control could not be established for over 24 hours. The root cause of this incident has not been determined, but software and operational errors contributed to the severity of the anomaly.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://near.jhuapl.edu/anom/Hoffman.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://near.jhuapl.edu/anom/Hoffman.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live | title=The NEAR Rendezvous Burn Anomaly of December 1998  |date=November 1999 | publisher=Final Report of the NEAR Anomaly Review Board | access-date=February 2, 2017}}</ref>

The original mission plan called for the four burns to be followed by an orbit insertion burn on January 10, 1999, but the abort of the first burn and loss of communication made this impossible. A new plan was put into effect in which ''NEAR'' flew by Eros on December 23, 1998, at 18:41:23 UT at a speed of 965&nbsp;m/s and a distance of 3827&nbsp;km from the center of mass of Eros. The camera took images of Eros, data were collected by the near [[Infrared|IR]] spectrograph, and radio tracking was performed during the flyby. A rendezvous maneuver was performed on January 3, 1999, involving a thruster burn to match ''NEAR''{{'s}} orbital speed to that of Eros. A [[hydrazine]] thruster burn took place on January 20 to fine-tune the trajectory. On August 12, a two-minute thruster burn slowed the spacecraft velocity relative to Eros to 300&nbsp;km/h.<ref name="NSSDC" />