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.
