The company's first asteroid launch was scrapped in January and has been put off indefinitely.
Philadelphia's The Asteroid No. 4 takes dreamy shoegazer pop and mixes in elements of '60s psychedelia and latter-day space rock to create a folk-rock sound that falls somewhere between The Byrds and The Stone Roses.
For the next year, Near's instruments will continue to examine the potato-shaped asteroid's chemistry, geology, and evolutionary history.
The only experience in landing on asteroids comes from Nasa's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (Near) mission, which touched down on the asteroid Eros.
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The probe entered a special low-altitude orbit for about five months to allow the GRAND instrument to analyze emissions from Vesta's surface that result from collisions between cosmic ray particles and elements in the asteroid's dirt.
NEAR-Shoemaker was then able to produce a "fingerprint" of the asteroid's chemical makeup, mission scientists said.
When part of an asteroid's surface passes from night to day, it starts to warm up.
For the first two months, Near will slowly descend to within 50 km (31 miles) from the asteroid's surface.
The asteroid's position was very close to the sun, so astronomers had to observe it when the sky was dark.
It will put NEAR directly between the sun and Eros, affording a unique opportunity to map the asteroid's minerals under optimal lighting.
Planetary defence advocates say it is imperative to collect data on the asteroid's path as soon as possible to know whether it will strike our planet or not.
On the other hand, a longer wait means a more accurate gauge of the asteroid's orbit, and thus of the need to do anything at all.
ECONOMIST: The American Association for the Advancement of Science
From their observations, they were able to calculate the asteroid's future and past paths and predict Friday's near-miss - which will be the closest the object comes for at least 30 years.
The functioning equipment on the probe includes a device to measure the asteroid's magnetism, a spectrometer to examine its composition, an electronic camera and a laser rangefinder to survey its precise shape.
That was another challenge for the astronomers: Because they didn't know the asteroid's rotation period, they didn't know when it would wax and wane, and when it would grow too faint to see.
The reaction to this radiation is greater on the afternoon side than on the morning side and there is thus a small force pushing on the afternoon side that gradually distorts the asteroid's orbit.
The spacecraft's data indicates the asteroid has a very primitive surface - rather like the chondritic meteorites that are sometimes picked up on Earth and which are assumed to have come from bodies that experienced no melting or differentiation.
The asteroid's arrival was preceded by a damaging meteor event in Russia on Friday - but indications from the meteor's path suggest that the two events are entirely unrelated - just a "cosmic coincidence", as Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University Belfast told BBC News.
Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: Radar observations made during this week's close encounter with the asteroid Apophis have ruled out the risk of a collision with Earth in 2036, NASA says.
MSN: How to confirm we've found another Earth - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
Preliminary mapping data show that Vesta is a world layered in many different rock types and minerals, supporting the notion that it might have become a major planet had it not been trapped in the asteroid belt's powerful gravitational rip tides.
In the three minutes and nine seconds of Scott Manley's YouTube video, each asteroid discovery over the past 30 years emerges as a bright shock of color on a mostly black background, a map of the earth's circulation in our solar system.
They become denizens of the asteroid belt that's found between Mars and Jupiter until they fall out of orbit, possibly as a result of a collision with another object.
"In a nutshell, the plan in NASA's hands calls for catching an asteroid with a robotic spacecraft and towing it back toward Earth, where it would then be placed in a stable orbit around the moon, " read a statement from the office of Florida Sen.
"One patch is about 25% brighter than the rest of the asteroid, and that's a very large difference from the materials you expect to find on the surface, " says Dr Mark Robinson, a Near imaging team member from Northwestern University.
They are then given a catalogue number (Bagehot's shows that it was the 2, 901st asteroid to be identified formally).
This relative smoothness suggests the area's relative youth compared to other parts of the asteroid, project scientist Andrew Cheng said.
The programs in question are the Clementine II asteroid intercept experiment, the Army's Kinetic Kill Anti-Satellite Weapon and the Military Space Plane.
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But over time, it's an important consideration when trying to understand where an asteroid is headed.
"There is no strong evidence that it's a rubble pile like Mathilde, " the large asteroid Near passed and photographed in 1997.
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