NEO Surveyor's Telescope Optical Bench Under Construction at JPL

A technician operates articulating equipment to rotate the Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) mission's aluminum optical bench – part of the spacecraft's telescope – in a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17, 2024.

NEO Surveyor's sole instrument is a "three-mirror anastigmat telescope," which will rely on a set of curved mirrors to focus light onto its infrared detectors in such a way that minimizes optical aberrations. When complete, the telescope will be housed inside an instrument enclosure – being built in a different JPL clean room – that is fabricated from dark composite material that allows heat to escape, helping to keep the telescope cool and prevent its own heat from obscuring observations.

The NEO Surveyor mission is tasked by NASA's Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency's ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA's Planetary Missions Program Office at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.

The project is being developed by JPL and is led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer at UCLA. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission's data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information about NEO Surveyor is available at: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor