From Inner Earth to Outer Space

On a cold day in February 2001, a spacecraft landed on 433 Eros, an asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft had completed its five-year journey to investigate fundamental questions about the nature and origin of near-Earth objects for the first time. The technical demands of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous NEAR-Shoemaker (NEAR) mission were immense. A multidisciplinary team of US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists and engineers drew from many scientific and industrial resources, including the predominantly innerEarth-focused oil and gas industry. Applying technologies developed for oil and gas exploration to scientific endeavors is not a new practice. Oilfield technologies have often been applied in the interest of science. For example, deep-drilling projects conducted on land and in most major oceans of the world have contributed to our understanding of Earth’s past as well as its future. Engineers and scientists with the internationally funded Ocean Drilling Program began subsea drilling operations in 1961 to explore the hard outer layer of the Earth’s crust, or lithosphere. Scientists used tools and techniques developed for oil and gas exploration to document continental drift and to generate a substantial quantity of data relating to plate tectonics.