Illustration of NEO Surveyor, which is a mission designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Agency officials have completed a rigorous technical and programmatic review, known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), and confirmed NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) – the next flight mission out of the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) – establishing NASA’s commitment to the mission’s technical, cost, and schedule baseline. The decision commits NASA to a development cost baseline of $1.2 billion and a commitment to be ready for a launch no later than June 2028. The cost and schedule commitments outlined at KDP-C align the NEO Surveyor mission with program management best practices that account for potential technical risks and budgetary uncertainty beyond the development project’s control.
NEO Surveyor is an infrared space telescope designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts by expediting our ability to discover and characterize at least 90% of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit, collectively known as near-earth objects, or NEOs. NEO Surveyor’s successful completion of this review furthers NASA’s commitment to planetary defense and the search for NEOs that could one day pose an impact threat to Earth.
The flight mission, which falls under the agency’s Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission directorate, is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and the survey investigation is led by the University of Arizona. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center provides NEO Surveyor program management, and program oversight is provided by the PDCO, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency‘s ongoing efforts in Planetary Defense.
Learn more about NASA’s Planetary Defense efforts by following @AsteroidWatch on Twitter.
Read the latest Planetary Defense news at: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense
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