Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor – Falcon 9 – TBD – сентябрь 2027

[zandr]

https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/7788

Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor
Launch Time
NET September, 2027
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Rocket  Falcon 9 Block 5
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Mission Details
Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor
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 the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. These are collectively known as near-Earth objects or NEOs.

The mission will conduct a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the unknown NEOs larger than 140 meters (460 feet). These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. By using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, the telescope can also make more accurate measurements of the sizes of NEOs and gain information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.
Payloads: 1

Location
SLC-40 or LC-39A, Florida, USA

[zandr]

https://x.com/NASA_LSP/status/1893072494103613699

NASA's Launch Services Program  @NASA_LSP
NASA has selected @SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch NEO Surveyor!
NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a planetary defense space telescope that will look for asteroids and comets that could potentially pose a threat to Earth. Targeting launch NET Sept. 2027.

[zandr]

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/

NEO Surveyor
Near-Earth Object Surveyor Space Telescope
Overview
Building on the success of NASA's NEOWISE space telescope, the agency's NEO Surveyor will be the first spacecraft created specifically to find large numbers of asteroids and comets that are potentially hazardous to Earth.
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.
Use NASA's Eyes on Asteroids interactive (below) for a real-time visualization of every known asteroid or comet classified as a Near-Earth Object, or NEO.

Why We're Launching NEO Surveyor

^{On June 7, 2024, clean room technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California use a crane to lift the lid of the Medium Articulating Transportation System (MATS) that will be used during the construction and transportation of components for NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission.
NASA/JPL-Caltech}

• Finding near-Earth objects is required by law.
• We can only do something about hazardous near-Earth objects if we can find them first.
• NEO Surveyor will find asteroids and comets that other space missions cannot, filling a critical gap in humanity's ability to detect potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.
• In addition to planetary defense, scientists will use data from NEO Surveyor for studies of near-Earth objects to learn more about the evolution of the solar system.

Инфракрасный телескоп для поиска астероидов и тёмных комет.

[zandr]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/neosurveyor/2025/02/11/nasas-neo-surveyor-successfully-completes-critical-design-review/

NASA's NEO Surveyor Successfully Completes Critical Design Review
On Feb. 6, NASA's NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) passed its critical design review, or CDR, at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the project is managed. Capping three days of presentations, a NASA Standing Review Board determined that the mission meets all technical performance measures and requirements. The project will now move forward to the next phases of construction and testing.
After being built at JPL, the spacecraft's instrument enclosure moved to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for tests that replicate the environmental conditions of launch and space. It will soon return to NASA JPL, where work will continue.
Meanwhile, the mission's telescope, which is part of a large blocky aluminum structure called an Optical Telescope Assembly, is undergoing final testing at NASA JPL. This spring, both the telescope and instrument enclosure will ship to mission contractor Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah, where the rest of the subsystems will be integrated and tested.
As NASA's first space-based detection mission specifically designed for planetary defense, NEO Surveyor will seek out, measure, and characterize the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that might pose a hazard to Earth. While these near-Earth objects don't reflect much visible light, they glow brightly in infrared light due to heating by the Sun.
Expected to launch no earlier than late 2027, the NEO Surveyor mission is led by Professor Amy Mainzer at UCLA for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. It is being developed by JPL under management of the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, SDL, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission's data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

[zandr]

https://vk.com/spacex?w=wall-41152133_519319

Не ранее сентября 2027 года ракета Falcon 9 запустит миссию NASA по планетарной защите – Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor

Космический аппарат представляет собой 50-сантиметровый телескоп, предназначенный для обнаружения астероидов и комет, которые могут представлять потенциальную угрозу для Земли. Это будет уже третья миссия по планетарной защите, запущенная на ракете SpaceX. Стоимость контракта на запуск составляет $100 млн.

[Олег]

То есть проект СОДА таки реализуют, за который Б. Шустов ратовал. Правда, не наши а США.

[zandr]

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/neo-surveyor/2026/05/05/nasas-next-gen-near-earth-asteroid-space-telescope-takes-shape/

NASA's Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape

^{Engineers attach the aluminum telescope for NASA's NEO Surveyor to the flight base frame at Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, in September 2025. The telescope is connected via a system of struts that prevents heat from passing from the spacecraft to the instrument.
Space Dynamics Laboratory/Allison Bills}

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA's first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is undergoing integration and testing. With launch set for no earlier than September 2027, teams across the United States are hard at work building the spacecraft's components, planning the kind of survey and science it will do, and developing the software to process the huge quantity of data the mission will generate.
In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with discovering potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs, but many of these objects are difficult to find with ground-based surveys. Some are as dark as charcoal, others are tiny, and many lurk in the glare of the Sun, where ground-based optical telescopes can't see. To mitigate this, NEO Surveyor is being custom-built to scan the solar system to detect objects that will glow in the infrared as they are heated by the Sun — as opposed to the optical light they reflect, which is what ground-based surveys measure — to provide enough advance warning for humanity to do something about them, if necessary.
The spacecraft will travel about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the Sun to a region of gravitational stability called the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (or L1 point), continuously scanning large swaths of the sky for at least five years in search of NEOs that have yet to be found.

^{The bus structure of NASA's NEO Surveyor, shown here, underwent a round of testing at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2025. The bus houses the power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems, all isolated from the telescope and sensitive detectors.
BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems}

"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. "Our focus is on deploying a robust observatory to the Sun-Earth L1 point, where it will conduct a continuous, multi-year infrared survey. 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."

Modular approach
Having been assembled at JPL, both the spacecraft's infrared telescope and its instrument enclosure are undergoing integration and testing at Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan. An angular structure measuring 12 feet (3.7 meters) long, the instrument enclosure protects the spacecraft's telescope and removes heat that could otherwise affect the heat-sensitive infrared observations.  Project engineers plan to carry out focus tests in a chamber at SDL that simulates the extreme environment of deep space to ensure the instrument works as designed and the camera remains in focus at very cold temperatures and in zero gravity.
The camera is composed of two detector arrays, tuned to generate detailed images of asteroids and comets within two infrared bands. Each array creates a 16-megapixel mosaic of the sky. Imaging the same part of the sky over the two infrared bands enables the instrument to measure an asteroid or comet's temperature, yielding an estimate of the object's size.
The spacecraft will also sport a 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) sunshade that allows it to look close to the Sun by blocking glare from entering the telescope's aperture. By far the largest feature of NEO Surveyor, the structure also has solar panels on its Sun-facing surface to generate the electricity to power the spacecraft's systems.
At BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, the sunshade is currently undergoing tests with the spacecraft's bus, which houses power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems. The integrated telescope and enclosure will from SDL to travel to BAE Systems, where they will complete the spacecraft.

Science, data, survey strategy
Meanwhile, the mission's science team is busy planning ways to harness the full capabilities of this cutting-edge spacecraft.
"We have a multi-institutional team, from seasoned scientists to undergraduate students, with a broad expertise in infrared mission design," said Amy Mainzer, the mission's lead at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "We are currently working to develop the most efficient survey strategy that the mission will use to detect some of the hardest-to-find asteroids in our solar system, plus any comets that may be headed our way."
When the mission's data comes to Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network, it will go to the NEO Surveyor Survey Data Center at Caltech's IPAC in Pasadena, California. Responsible for processing and calibrating the huge number of observations that the spacecraft delivers, the center will also produce images and source catalogs for archiving at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.
After identifying the moving objects in the data, IPAC will report them to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the international clearinghouse for all position measurements of minor bodies in our solar system and responsible entity for designating new discoveries. This data can then be used by planetary defense groups, including JPL's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which calculates the orbits for all known asteroids and comets while also predicting the impact risk for hazardous objects many years into the future. The Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA will plan the survey and deliver measurements of the asteroid and comet sizes and other physical properties to public archives every six months.