Advanced Instrument To Detect And Track Potential Earth-Impact Threats

NASA announced the selection of SpaceX to launch its advanced asteroid hunting telescope to detect and track asteroids and comets that may potentially threaten Earth with a devastating impact.

The commercial space company will launch its Falcon 9 rocket from Florida approximately September 2027 under the Near-Earth Object – NEO- Surveyor mission to lift a 20-inch diameter telescope into orbit that will be capable of sensing in two infrared or heat-sensing wavelengths. These will enable the instrument to detect both bright and dark asteroids. Dark asteroids pose the most difficulty in detection with existing NASA assets.

The space agency said, “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 two infrared imaging sensors will permit the telescope to gather accurate measurements of the sizes of NEOs as well as collect information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.

The five-year mission will conduct a baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the unknown NEOs that are larger than 460 feet (140 meters). NASA said, “These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact.”

The mission is under NASA’s Planetary Science Division and will be overseen by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne received contracts to build the NEO Surveyor spacecraft and its instrument payload that Falcon 9 will lift to orbit. The contract with SpaceX covers launch service and mission related costs and is valued at about $100 million.

FMI:  www.nasa.gov/