Meet NASA's NEO Surveyor: A 'one-of-a-kind mission' designed to find the most dangerous asteroids

Many near-Earth objects (NEO) are too dark to observe in visible light. Some of them even spend much of their time lurking in the Sun’s blinding glare, making it difficult for ground-based observatories to detect them. However, NASA is now working on the NEO Surveyor, which, set for launch no earlier than September 2027, is going to address this observation gap.

While ground-based surveys detect asteroids by analyzing sunlight they reflect, the NEO Surveyor will detect the glow of these objects in the infrared as they are warmed by the Sun and provide us enough advance warning of a possible impact to allow us to do something about it.

After launch, the spacecraft will traverse roughly one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) toward the Sun to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point—a region of gravitational stability between Earth and the Sun. From this vantage point, the spacecraft will continuously scan vast areas of the sky for at least five years, searching for asteroids and comets that have so far escaped detection. The observatory's 20-inch aperture camera has two detector arrays, each of which will create a 16-megapixel mosaic of the sky and generate detailed images of asteroids and comets in two infrared bands. This will allow scientists to measure the temperature of an asteroid or comet and provide insights into its size.

The largest feature of the observatory is its 6-meter-long sunshade that will block the Sun's glare from entering the telescope’s aperture. It also has solar panels on its Sun-facing side that will generate the electricity needed to power the mission throughout its journey.

“NEO Surveyor is a one-of-a-kind mission designed to solve a specific challenge: finding asteroids and comets that pose the greatest risk to Earth,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, per a NASA press release posted in May that said the observatory had entered the integration and testing phase. “By identifying objects that ground telescopes can miss, this mission will provide the critical data we need to safeguard our planet for years to come.” Both the spacecraft's sunshade and its bus, which contains power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems, had been undergoing testing at the time at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado. 

All the data collected by NEO Surveyor will reach Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network before going to Caltech's IPAC in Pasadena, California. IPAC will process and calibrate the data and produce images and catalogs for archiving at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Potential new discoveries will then be conveyed to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the international organization responsible for cataloging small bodies throughout the solar system. Organizations like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) can then use this data to calculate impact risks for hazardous objects years into the future.

More on Starlust 

Newly detected 40-meter asteroid close to Venus orbit could strike Earth with city-level impact 

What would really happen if an asteroid hit Earth today—and is NASA ready?