NASA's NEOSurveyor (The Surveyor probe is a spacecraft specifically designed to detect asteroids that may threaten the Earth. It is expected to be launched in 2027. After passing environmental testing, its instrument case returnsJPL performs final assembly. The mission will use infrared technology to discover hard-to-see near-Earth objects, including those with darker surfaces. After assembly is completed at JPL, the core components of the spacecraft will be assembled in Utah for final integration.

Illustration of NEO Surveyor, a mission designed to discover and characterize the majority of potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's asteroid-hunting mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) probe, is on track to launch at the end of 2027. In early March, a key component of the spacecraft, the instrument housing, returned to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California after completing environmental testing at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The 12-foot-long (3.7-meter) enclosure, built by JPL, is designed to protect the spacecraft's infrared telescope and help keep it cool during its operations in space. Because infrared telescopes can detect heat, they must be kept cool to prevent their own systems from interfering with observations.

Components for NASA's NEO Surveyor (left) and the agency's ASTHROS mission share the same clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in March, as operations on both missions continue. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NEO Surveyor is NASA's first space mission dedicated to planetary defense. It will use infrared sensors to detect the heat emitted by near-Earth objects as they are heated by the sun. This allows it to even spot dark, hard-to-see asteroids and comets that could pose a threat to Earth.

Over the course of several weeks at JPL, engineers and technicians will reinstall cables and complete taping of the edges of the instrument housing's composite panels in the historic HighBay1 cleanroom of the laboratory's Spacecraft Assembly Facility. This work can be viewed via live camera. Sharing the room with the NEOSurveyor hardware is a telescope for NASA's ASTHROS (Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for Submillimeter Wavelength High Spectral Resolution Observations), an atmospheric balloon mission.

In December 2024, the instrument housing of NASA's Near-Earth Object Explorer prepared for critical environmental testing in the historic Room A of the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The 12-foot-long (3.7-meter-long) angular structure is wrapped in a silver thermal blanket to withstand the cold, airless conditions the spacecraft will experience in deep space. This huge thermal vacuum testing facility is famous for testing the Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Image source: NASA

Once NEO Surveyor's instrument housing is complete, it will be sent to the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah, where it will be assembled with another key piece of hardware: the telescope's aluminum body, called the Optical Telescope Assembly, which is also manufactured by JPL. The telescope itself left JPL earlier this month and arrived at SDL on March 13.

A mirror that will be installed in NASA's Near-Earth Object Explorer (NEOSurveyor) telescope can be seen during an inspection of the mirror surface at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17, 2024. The infrared telescope, built in a JPL clean room, is the spacecraft's only instrument and will be used to search for some of the most elusive near-Earth objects that could pose a danger to Earth. The reflection of Chief Optical Engineer Brian Monacelli can be seen in the mirror. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NEOSurveyor is NASA's next-generation space telescope designed to detect and track near-Earth objects (NEOs) that may pose a threat to Earth. The mission is led by Professor Amy Mainzer of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office at UCLA and is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) within the Planetary Mission Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The spacecraft is being developed with the participation of key industry partners including BAE Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) and Teledyne, who are manufacturing key components and instrumentation. Once in space, mission operations will be supported by the Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder. Caltech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) in Pasadena will generate and manage some of the mission data products. JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, is leading the development of the spacecraft.

Compiled from /ScitechDaily