HUNTSVILLE — As an asteroid approaches Earth, NASA has awarded a contract to SpaceX for the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
Under the $100 million contract, SpaceX will provide launch services for the mission, which will detect and observe asteroids and comets that could potentially pose an impact threat to Earth. The cost includes the launch service and other mission related costs. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeted to launch no earlier than September 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.
The NEO Surveyor will be the first spacecraft created specifically to find large numbers of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit.
As it scans the solar system, NEO Surveyor’s sensitive infrared detectors will track the most elusive near-Earth objects. Dark asteroids and comets don’t reflect much visible light, for example, but they will glow in the infrared spectrum as they’re heated by sunlight.
In addition, NEO Surveyor will be able to find asteroids that approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, as well as ones both leading and trailing our planet’s orbit, where they are typically obscured by the glare of sunlight. All of these are threats that larger ground-based observatories could miss.
The NEO Surveyor mission consists of a single scientific instrument: an almost 20-inch (50-centimeter) diameter telescope that will operate in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting both bright and dark asteroids, the latter being the most difficult type to find with existing assets.
The space telescope is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize most of . These are collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs.
The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Program oversight is provided by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense.
NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor. The project is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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