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.

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