NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor Planetary Defense Mission Update | JPL

NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor Planetary Defense Mission Update | JPL

The instrument enclosure of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor is prepared for critical environmental tests inside the historic Chamber A at the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in December 2024. Wrapped in silver thermal blanketing, the 12-foot-long (3.7-meter-long) angular structure was subjected to the frigid, airless conditions that the spacecraft will experience when in deep space. The cavernous thermal-vacuum test facility is famous for testing the Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

The instrument enclosure for NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor is prepared for environmental testing inside the historic Chamber A in the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston in December 2024. Mounted to its articulating platform, on which it was securely positioned during assembly, the 12-foot-long (3.7-meter-long) angular structure was inspected by technicians before being placed inside the testing chamber.

A mirror set to be installed inside the telescope for NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) is seen during an inspection of the mirror's surface at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17, 2024. Being built in a JPL clean room, the infrared telescope is the spacecraft's only instrument and it will be used to seek out a portion of the hardest-to-find near-Earth objects that may pose a hazard to our planet.

The reflection of principal optical engineer Brian Monacelli can be seen in the mirror.

Known as a "three-mirror anastigmat telescope," the instrument will rely on a set of curved mirrors to focus light onto its infrared detectors in a way that minimizes optical aberrations.

In this illustration showing NEO Surveyor, NASA's next-generation near-Earth object hunter, the spacecraft floats in an infrared starfield containing stars, star clusters, gas, and dust. More than 100 asteroids can be seen as red dots, with a number of them visible in a track that shows how they were captured at different times as they marched across the sky. This starfield was observed by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

The infrared Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. These are collectively known as near-earth objects, or NEOs.

NEO Surveyor will launch no earlier than September 2027.

NEO Surveyor consists of a single scientific instrument: a 50 centimeter (nearly 20 inch) diameter telescope that operates in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting both bright and dark asteroids—the most difficult type to find.

After launch, NEO Surveyor will carry out a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (460 feet). These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. By using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, NEO Surveyor can make accurate measurements of NEO sizes and gain valuable information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.

NEO Surveyor employs an innovative observation strategy to independently discover new asteroids and comets and determine their orbits with enough accuracy to allow them to be found again. In five years of survey operation, NEO Surveyor is designed to make significant progress toward meeting the U.S. Congress's mandate to NASA to find more than 90 percent of all NEOs larger than 140 meters in diameter.

NASA's NEO Surveyor will build upon the successes of NEOWISE as the first space mission built specifically to find large numbers of hazardous asteroids and comets. The space telescope will launch to a region of gravitational stability between the Earth and the Sun called the L1 Lagrange point, where the spacecraft will orbit during its five-year primary mission. From this location, the space telescope will view the solar system in infrared wavelengths and light that is invisible to the human eye. Because those wavelengths are mostly blocked by Earth's atmosphere, larger ground-based observatories may miss near-Earth objects that NEO Surveyor will be able to spot from space by using its modest light-collecting aperture of nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters).

NEO Surveyor's cutting-edge detectors are designed to observe two heat-sensitive infrared bands that were chosen specifically so the spacecraft can track the most challenging-to-find near-Earth objects, such as dark asteroids and comets that do not reflect much visible light. In the infrared wavelengths that NEO Surveyor is sensitive to, these objects glow as they are heated by sunlight. In addition, NEO Surveyor will be able to find asteroids that approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, as well as those that lead and trail our planet's orbit, where they are typically obscured by the glare of sunlight—objects known as Earth Trojans.

The mission is tasked by NASA's Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the PDCO, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency's ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA's Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.

The project is being developed by JPL and is led by survey director Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including Ball Aerospace, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission's data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NEO Surveyor Mission: 
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/near-earth-object-surveyor/

JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS): https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/

Planetary Defense at NASA: 
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense

Image Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Image Dates: Dec. 2022-March 2025

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