NASA's NEO Surveyor and ASTHROS Share Clean Room

The dark, bulky instrument enclosure for NASA's NEO Surveyor is seen here (left) in the High Bay 1 clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in March 2025. A major component of the mission, the instrument enclosure journeyed back to JPL in early March after completing environmental testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The gold-coated, circular antenna at right is part of the telescope for NASA's ASTHROS (Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for High Spectral Resolution Observations at Submillimeter-wavelengths), an atmospheric balloon mission; it has been in the clean room since December 2024.

The NEO Surveyor mission is led by Professor Amy Mainzer at UCLA for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office and is being managed by JPL for the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems, SDL, and Teledyne are among the companies that were contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder will support operations, and Caltech's IPAC in Pasadena, California, is responsible for producing some of 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/