NASA’s NEO Surveyor Successfully Completes Critical Design Review

On Feb. 6, NASA’s NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) passed its critical design review, or CDR, at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the project is managed. Capping three days of presentations, a NASA Standing Review Board determined that the mission meets all technical performance measures and requirements. The project will now move forward to the next phases of construction and testing.

After being built at JPL, the spacecraft’s instrument enclosure moved to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for tests that replicate the environmental conditions of launch and space. It will soon return to NASA JPL, where work will continue.

Meanwhile, the mission’s telescope, which is part of a large blocky aluminum structure called an Optical Telescope Assembly, is undergoing final testing at NASA JPL. This spring, both the telescope and instrument enclosure will ship to mission contractor Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah, where the rest of the subsystems will be integrated and tested.

As NASA’s first space-based detection mission specifically designed for planetary defense, NEO Surveyor will seek out, measure, and characterize the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that might pose a hazard to Earth. While these near-Earth objects don’t reflect much visible light, they glow brightly in infrared light due to heating by the Sun.

Expected to launch no earlier than late 2027, the NEO Surveyor mission is led by Professor Amy Mainzer at UCLA for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. It is being developed by JPL under management of the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, SDL, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Major Component of NASA’s NEO Surveyor Begins Test for Deep Space

A major element of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is undergoing testing at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Called the instrument enclosure, the angular structure measures 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and is designed to protect the spacecraft’s infrared telescope while also removing heat from it during operations in space.

After being built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the enclosure was shipped to NASA Johnson in November. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeting a late 2027-launch.

As NASA’s first space-based detection mission specifically designed for planetary defense, NEO Surveyor will seek out, measure, and characterize the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that might pose a hazard to Earth. While these near-Earth objects don’t reflect much visible light, they glow brightly in infrared light due to heating by the Sun.

But first, the mission needs to perform a series of tests on all the equipment to make sure it survives launch and performs as intended in the vacuum of space. To that end, a crew at NASA Johnson, led by NEO Surveyor contractor BAE Systems, has been exposing the enclosure to the frigid, airless conditions it will experience in deep space using the facility’s historic Chamber A. Part of Johnson’s Space Environment Simulation Laboratory, the cavernous thermal-vacuum facility tested the Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the Moon and, more recently, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s optical element and science instruments in 2017.

After testing, the enclosure will travel to the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah. There, it will be joined together with the telescope’s blocky aluminum body, called the optical bench, which JPL built and is currently testing.

JPL was within the mandatory evacuation zone for the Eaton Fire. Employees were instructed to work from home beginning Jan. 8, and most will continue to do so until Monday, Jan. 27. Updates on the laboratory’s status are being posted at emergency.jpl.nasa.gov. JPL facilities, labs, and hardware, including components for NEO Surveyor, were secured and protected by critical staff that remained on the property during the fire.

The NEO Surveyor mission is led by Survey Director Dr. Amy Mainzer at UCLA for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and is being developed by JPL under management of the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, SDL, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information about NEO Surveyor is available at:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/

News Media Contacts

Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

NASA’s NEO Surveyor Successfully Passes Key Milestone

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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