NASA Selects SpaceX to Provide Launch Services for Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

total cost for the launch is appx. $100 million

BREVARD COUNTY • FLORIDA—NASA has selected SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, to provide launch services for the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission. This mission will detect and observe asteroids and comets that could potentially pose an impact threat to Earth.

The firm-fixed-price launch service task order is being awarded under the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity NASA Launch Services II contract. The total cost to NASA for the launch service is approximately $100 million, which includes the launch service and other mission-related costs. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeted to launch no earlier than September 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

The NEO Surveyor mission consists of a single scientific instrument: an almost 20-inch diameter telescope operating in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting both bright and dark asteroids, the latter being the most challenging type to find with existing assets.

The space telescope is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts by discovering and characterizing most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. These are collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs.

The mission will conduct a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of unknown NEOs larger than 140 meters (460 feet).

These objects are large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. Using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, the telescope can also make more accurate measurements of NEOs’ sizes and gain information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.

The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Program oversight is provided by NASA’s 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 in Huntsville, Alabama, provides program management for NEO Surveyor. The project is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Multiple aerospace and engineering companies are contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne.

The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will support operations, and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products.

Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Mission team leadership includes the University of California, Los Angeles. NASA’s Launch Services Program at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for managing the launch service.

For more information about NEO Surveyor, visit:

NEO Surveyor

Similar Stories