Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission

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 December 2022, NEO Surveyor is expected to be launched no later than June 2028. As of February 2025, it will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida 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 (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 unrelated to 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.This Summer's Asteroid Near-Miss Helped Greenlight NASA's NEOCam Mission to Search the Skies for Killer Spacerocks
Evan Gough, ''Universe Today'' 25 September 2019

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...the mission is the same, says Mark Sykes, CEO of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and a member of NEOCam's science team. "There is no independent or new spacecraft or operational design here. This mission is NEOCam".

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 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 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 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 , 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

Asteroids are dark, with albedos of at most 30% and as low as 5%. An optical telescope looks for the light they reflect and can therefore only see them when looking away from the Sun at the sunlit side of the asteroids, and not when looking towards the Sun at the unlit backside of the object. In addition, opposition surge makes asteroids even brighter when the Earth is close to the axis of sunlight, and the sky on Earth is much brighter in daytime. The combined effect is equivalent to the comparison of a Full moon at night to a New Moon in daytime, and the light of the Sun-lit asteroids has been called "full asteroid" similar to a "full moon". A telescope operating at thermal infrared wavelengths instead detects their surfaces that have been warmed by the Sun and is almost equally sensitive to their lit and unlit sides, but needs to operate in space to achieve good sensitivity over a wide field of view.

The NEO Surveillance Mission will employ a infrared telescope operating wide-field cameras at two thermal infrared wavelength channels for a total wavelength range between 4 μm and 10 μm. The camera will have two channels: NC1 has a wavelength range of 4–5.2 μm and NC2 spans 6–10 μm. NC1 is intended to detect background stars for astrometric registration and calibration, as well as the measurement of effective temperatures. NC2 is optimized to maximize sensitivity to typical NEO thermal emission at 200-300 K. Its field of view is 11.56 square degrees. It will use a version of the Astronomical Wide Area Infrared Imager (HAWAII) mercury–cadmium–telluride detector modified by Teledyne Imaging Sensors for optimal sensitivity in the NC1 and NC2 bands. The mission prototype detector was successfully tested in April 2013. The detector array is 2,048 × 2,048 pixels and will produce 82 gigabits of data per day. For good infrared performance without the use of cryogenic fluid refrigeration, the detector will be passively cooled to using techniques proven by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Unlike its predecessor NEOWISE, it will therefore not suffer from a performance degradation due to running out of coolant (its mission duration will however still be limited, as the orbital station keeping needed to maintain its position at Sun–Earth L₁ uses propellant; also, cosmic radiation will slowly degrade the detectors over time).

Operations

The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will operate in a halo orbit around the Sun–Earth L₁, and employ a sunshade. This orbit will allow fast data downlink speeds to Earth, allowing full-frame images to be downloaded from the telescope.

One advantage over NEOWISE is the wide field of regard. NEO Surveyor will be able to point anywhere from 45-120° in longitudinal distance from the sun and stopping at ±40° ecliptic latitude. The survey will be optimized to detect potentially hazardous objects and be performed continuously during the baseline mission (5 years). The survey will be halted each day for 2.25 hours to downlink the data. It will also be halted for calibration, station-keeping and momentum management maneuvers. NEO Surveyor will also be able to conduct targeted follow-up (TFO) to obtain more information for an object of special interest.

It is planned that moving object tracklets are delivered to the Minor Planet Center 2 to 3 times a day, on average 72 hours after their discovery. Additionally deep co-added images are published every 12 months. These deep co-added images most likely will like those of WISE be used by astronomers to study stars, brown dwarfs, and distant galaxies. It was also proposed that NEO Surveyor will include a transient alerting infrastructure, but none are planned to this date (October 2023).

In the first 30 days after the launch the in-orbit checkouts will be performed. After arriving at L₁ NEO Surveyor team will conduct a 6-month survey verification. In the nominal survey the telescope is expected to detect two-thirds of asteroids with a diameter larger than 140 meters in the first 5 years. The nominal mission will last for at least 12 years. After the survey end, the telescope will be decommissioned and put into a heliocentric orbit.

Images

See also

* Asteroid impact prediction
* Asteroid impact avoidance
* List of largest infrared telescopes
* List of near-Earth object observation projects
* Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE & NEOWISE)
* List of proposed space observatories
* Spacecraft at Sun–Earth L₁

;NEOs search projects
* B612 Foundation, an organization that studied NEOs and proposed a similar mission
* Sentinel Space Telescope, B612's failed space telescope proposal similar to NEOSM
* Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, a Canadian small satellite intended to detect NEOs
* The Spaceguard Foundation, an organization that attempts to locate NEOs
* Whipple (spacecraft), a proposed space telescope in the Discovery program
* Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a ground-based NEO detection system funded by NASA since the end of 2015

References

External links

old archived websites:

NEOCam website
by Caltech

official website
by the University of Arizona
other official websites:

website
by JPL

website
by NASA

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NASA space probes
Infrared telescopes
Space telescopes
Astronomical surveys
Asteroid surveys
Near-Earth object tracking
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Discovery program proposals
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