NEOSM

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 look close to the Sun and see objects inside Earth's orbit. The mission will be a successor to the NEOWISE mission; the principal investigator is also NEOWISE's principal investigator, Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona.

Since first proposed in 2006, the concept unsuccessfully competed repeatedly for NASA funding against science missions unrelated to planetary defense, despite a 2005 US Congressional directive to NASA. In 2019, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office decided to implement this mission 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 December 2022, NEO Surveyor is expected to be launched no later than June 2028.

History

In 2005, the U.S. Congress mandated NASA to achieve by the year 2020 specific levels of search completeness for discovering, cataloging, and characterizing dangerous asteroids larger than (Act of 2005, H.R. 1022; 109th), but it never appropriated specific funds for this effort. NASA did not prioritize this mandate, and directed the NEOCam project to compete against science missions for funds unrelated to planetary defense or disaster mitigation planning.

Proposals for NEOCam were submitted to NASA's Discovery Program in 2006, 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2017, but each time were not selected for launch. The mission concept nonetheless received technology development funding in 2010 to design and test new infrared detectors optimized for asteroid and comet detection and sizing. The project received additional funding for further technological development in September 2015 (US$3 million), and in January 2017.

Following calls to fully fund the mission outside NASA's Planetary Science Division or directly from Congress itself, NASA’s associate administrator for science announced on 23 September 2019 that instead of competing for funding, NEOCam will be implemented under the name NEO Surveillance Mission with budget from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, within the Planetary Science Division. The near-miss of asteroid 2019 OK, which slipped past extant detection methods in July 2019, has been suggested to have helped prompt this decision.This Summer's Asteroid Near-Miss Helped Greenlight NASA's NEOCam Mission to Search the Skies for Killer Spacerocks
Evan Gough, ''Universe Today'' 25 September 2019

For funding and management purposes, the NEO Surveillance Mission is officially a new project, but it is the same space telescope, the same team, and the mission's goals remain unchanged...the mission is the same, says Mark Sykes, CEO of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and a member of NEOCam's science team. "There is no independent or new spacecraft or operational design here. This mission is NEOCam".

Objectives

The main objective of the mission is to discover most of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than over the course of its mission and characterize their orbits. Its field of view and its sensitivity will be wide and deep enough to allow the mission to discover tens of thousands of new NEOs with sizes as small as in diameter. Secondary science goals include detection and characterization of approximately one million asteroids in the asteroid belt and thousands of comets, as well as identification of potential NEO targets for human and robotic exploration.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will lead development of the mission. The total cost of the mission is estimated to be between US$500 million and US$600 million.

Spacecraft

The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will have a total mass of no more than , allowing it to launch on a vehicle like a Atlas V or Falcon 9 Block 5 to the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange point. The mission should reach the 90% congressional goal within 10 years, with an anticipated mission lifetime of 12 years.

Telescope and camera

Most asteroids are black. Small ones are difficult to see in the blackness of outer space with an optical telescope, but a telescope operating at infrared wavelengths is sensitive to asteroids whose surfaces have been warmed by the Sun.

The NEO Surveillance Mission will employ a infrared telescope operating wide-field cameras at two thermal infrared wavelength channels for a total wavelength range between 4 µm and 10 µm. Its field of view is 11.56 square degrees. It will use a modified version of the HgCdTe Astronomical Wide Area Infrared Imager (HAWAII) mercury–cadmium–telluride detector developed by Teledyne Imaging Sensors. The mission prototype detector was successfully tested in April 2013. A monolithic 2k × 2k LWIR HgCdTe detector array for passively cooled space missions
Meghan Dorn; Craig McMurtry; Judith Pipher; William Forrest; Mario Cabrera; Andre Wong; A. K. Mainzer; Donald Lee; Jianmei Pan. ''Proceedings'', Volume 10709, High Energy, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy VIII; 1070907 (2018) The detector array is 2,048 × 2,048 pixels and will produce 82 gigabits of data per day. For good infrared performance without the use of cryogenic fluid refrigeration, the detector will be passively cooled to using techniques proven by the Spitzer Space Telescope. This means that unlike its predecessor NEOWISE, it will not suffer from a performance degradation due to running out of coolant (it does still have a limited mission duration however as it needs to use propellant for orbital station keeping in order to maintain its position at SEL1).

Operations

The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will operate in a halo orbit around the Sun–Earth L1, and employ a sunshade. This orbit will allow fast data downlink speeds to Earth, allowing full-frame images to be downloaded from the telescope.

Images

See also

* Asteroid impact prediction
* Asteroid impact avoidance
* List of largest infrared telescopes
* List of near-Earth object observation projects
* Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE & NEOWISE)
* List of proposed space observatories

;NEOs search projects
* B612 Foundation, an organization that studied NEOs and proposed a similar mission
* Sentinel Space Telescope, B612's failed space telescope proposal similar to NEOSM
* Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, a Canadian small satellite intended to detect NEOs
* The Spaceguard Foundation, an organization that attempts to locate NEOs
* Whipple (spacecraft), a proposed space telescope in the Discovery program
* Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a ground-based NEO detection system funded by NASA since the end of 2015

References

External links

NEOCam website
by Caltech

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NASA space probes
Infrared telescopes
Space telescopes
Astronomical surveys
Asteroid surveys
Near-Earth object tracking
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Discovery program proposals
2028 in spaceflight