mod_rewrite entire website to front page ONLY of new website - apache

Question

Now I've written dozens of redirects in my time, some with tricky regex, some more tame, but today, the very simplest redirect is stumping me on a CentOS server, running Apache 2.2.3.
All I'd like to do is redirect every single request on an old domain, regardless of path and query string, to the front page only of a new site. This is why, for example, a mod_alias Redirect directive isn't appropriate, since it appends the path to the new address.
In an Apache conf file, where the virtual server is defined, I now have
<VirtualHost THE.IP.ADDRESS:80>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/SITE_ROOT"
ServerName OLD_DOMAIN.com
<Directory "/var/www/html/SITE_ROOT">
Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ https://NEW_DOMAIN [R=301,L]
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
While the redirect to https://NEW_DOMAIN occurs as expected, the path of the original request is always appended, leading to 404 errors on the new site.
For example, visiting http://OLD_DOMAIN.com/asdf
redirects to https://NEW_DOMAIN.com/asdf
...when I'd actually want to arrive at https://NEW_DOMAIN.com/
Why is the path being appended, even though I'm not collecting a pattern match, and am not specifying such a match in the destination?
There are plenty of answers like this on SO already:
Apache redirect to a clean URL
https://stackoverflow.com/a/11590814/1738274
But I can't find a discrepancy comparing these solutions against my own configuration. Any ideas?

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://NEW_DOMAIN [R=301,NC,L] should work. I have tested with various URLs and it always redirects to https://NEW_DOMAIN
My config structure looks a bit different:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName OLD_DOMAIN.com
DocumentRoot "C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs"
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://NEW_DOMAIN [R=301,NC,L]
.......
.......