Key Component for NASAs NEO Surveyor Returns to JPL

Key Component for NASAs NEO Surveyor Returns to JPL
by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Apr 02, 2025

NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is on track for a planned launch in late 2027, with a major milestone recently achieved. A critical part of the spacecraft-its instrument enclosure-returned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California in early March after completing rigorous environmental testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The 12-foot (3.7-meter) long angular structure, developed at JPL, serves a dual purpose: shielding the spacecraft's infrared telescope and dissipating heat during flight. Since infrared telescopes rely on detecting thermal signatures, maintaining a low temperature is crucial to prevent interference from the spacecraft's own heat.

NEO Surveyor represents NASA's first orbital observatory dedicated solely to planetary defense. Utilizing infrared technology, the mission will detect heat emitted by near-Earth objects that have absorbed solar energy, enabling it to identify even low-reflectivity asteroids and comets. These observations aim to identify and assess potentially hazardous objects that may pose an impact risk to Earth.

Back at JPL, technicians and engineers will spend several weeks completing the reintegration of the instrument enclosure. This involves reinstalling internal cabling and finalizing the edge taping of its composite panels inside High Bay 1, the iconic clean room within the Spacecraft Assembly Facility. Viewers can observe this work live via a publicly available camera feed. The facility is also currently housing hardware for NASA's ASTHROS balloon observatory mission.

Following the reassembly, the enclosure will be shipped to the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah. There, it will be joined with the mission's optical telescope assembly-a lightweight aluminum body for the infrared instrument-which was also developed at JPL and arrived at SDL on March 13.

The NEO Surveyor mission is spearheaded by Professor Amy Mainzer of UCLA on behalf of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. JPL oversees mission development under the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Industrial and academic partners include BAE Systems, SDL, Teledyne, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Caltech's IPAC, which is responsible for certain mission data products. JPL itself is managed for NASA by Caltech.