NEO Surveyor

NEO Surveyor, formerly called Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), then NEO Surveillance Mission, is a planned space-based infrared telescope designed to survey the Solar System for potentially hazardous asteroids. The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will survey from the Sun–Earth L1 (inner) Lagrange point, allowing it to see objects inside Earth's orbit, and its mid-infrared detectors sensitive to thermal emission will detect asteroids independently of their reflected sunlight. The NEO Surveyor mission will be a successor to the NEOWISE mission, and the two missions have the same principal investigator, Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona. Since first proposed in 2006, the concept repeatedly competed unsuccessfully for NASA funding against science missions unrelated to planetary defense, despite an unfunded 2005 US Congressional directive to NASA. In 2019, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office decided to fund this mission outside NASA's science budget due to its national security implications. On 11 June 2021, NASA authorized the NEO Surveyor mission to proceed to the preliminary design phase. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will lead development of the mission. As of February 2025, NASA planned to launch NEO Surveyor on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in September 2027.

History In 2005, the U.S. Congress mandated NASA to achieve by the year 2020 specific levels of search completeness for discovering, cataloging, and characterizing dangerous asteroids larger than 140 m (460 ft) (Act of 2005, H.R. 1022; 109th), but it never appropriated specific funds for this effort. NASA did not prioritize this unfunded mandate, and directed the NEOCam project to compete against science missions for general funds not earmarked for planetary defense and disaster mitigation planning. Proposals for NEOCam were submitted to NASA's Discovery Program in 2006, 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2017, but each time were not selected for launch. The mission concept nonetheless received technology development funding in 2010 to design and test new infrared detectors optimized for asteroid and comet detection and sizing. The project received additional funding for further technological development in September 2015 (US$3 million), and in January 2017. Following calls to fully fund the mission outside NASA's Planetary Science Division or directly from Congress itself, NASA's associate administrator for science announced on 23 September 2019 that instead of competing for funding, NEOCam will be implemented under the name NEO Surveillance Mission with budget from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, within the Planetary Science Division. The near-miss of asteroid 2019 OK, which slipped past extant detection methods in July 2019, has been suggested to have helped prompt this decision. For funding and management purposes, the NEO Surveillance Mission is officially a new project, but it is the same space telescope, the same team, and the mission's goals remain unchanged. On February 11, 2025 the mission passed its critical design review, moving the project towards construction and testing.

Objectives

The main objective of the mission is to discover most of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 m (460 ft) over the course of its mission and characterize their orbits. Its field of view and its sensitivity will be wide and deep enough to allow the mission to discover about 200,000 to 300,000 new NEOs with sizes as small as 10 m (33 ft) in diameter. Secondary science goals include detection and characterization of approximately one million asteroids in the asteroid belt and thousands of comets, as well as identification of potential NEO targets for human and robotic exploration. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) leads the development of the mission. The total cost of the mission is estimated to be between US$500 million and US$600 million. The mission has a development cost baseline of $1.2 billion. On the NEO Surveyor website the following mission requirements are stated:

Find 2⁄3 of Asteroids Larger than 140 Meters in Diameter Assess the Overall Threat Posed by Potential Earth Impactors Assess the Impact Threat Posed by Comets Determine Orbits and Physical Characteristics of Specific Discovered Objects

Spacecraft

The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will have a total mass of no more than 1,300 kg (2,900 lb), allowing it to launch on a vehicle like a Falcon 9 Block 5 to the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange point. The mission should reach the 90% congressional goal within 10 years, with an anticipated mission lifetime of 12 years.

Telescope and camera

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