NEAR celebration

The Cornell teams involved in the first landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid -- the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission -- celebrated their success in the Space Sciences Building Feb. 23, with champagne and an asteroid-decorated cake, above. Among the celebrants, right, of the Feb. 12 landing -- putting a human face on all those calculations -- was Erin Bell, 5, daughter of NEAR team members Maureen Bell, a staff researcher, and Jim Bell, assistant professor of astronomy.