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NASA’s Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape

May 5, 2026

Technicians in white cleanroom suits carefully maneuver a large, gold-mirrored space telescope component draped in silver thermal insulation as it is lowered onto a specialized mounting platform.

Engineers attach the aluminum telescope for NASA’s NEO Surveyor to the flight base frame at Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, in September 2025. The telescope is connected via a system of struts that prevents heat from passing from the spacecraft to the instrument.

Credit: Space Dynamics Laboratory/Allison Bills

A team of engineers and scientists are building NEO Surveyor to seek out the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that could impact Earth.

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA’s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is undergoing integration and testing. With launch set for no earlier than September 2027, teams across the United States are hard at work building the spacecraft’s components, planning the kind of survey and science it will do, and developing the software to process the huge quantity of data the mission will generate.

In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with discovering potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs, but many of these objects are difficult to find with ground-based surveys. Some are as dark as charcoal, others are tiny, and many lurk in the glare of the Sun, where ground-based optical telescopes can’t see. To mitigate this, NEO Surveyor is being custom-built to scan the solar system to detect objects that will glow in the infrared as they are heated by the Sun — as opposed to the optical light they reflect, which is what ground-based surveys measure — to provide enough advance warning for humanity to do something about them, if necessary.