NEO Surveyor’s Large Sunshade Takes Shape

The sunshade for NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission towers above a fixture at supplier Applied Aerospace in Stockton, California, in September 2025. Standing at over 20 feet (6 meters) high, the sunshade is the largest component of spacecraft. The structure was next shipped to BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, for a “fit check” with the spacecraft bus. For scale, technicians and engineers from the project in front of the sunshade. The sunshade’s Sun-facing surface (visible here) will next be fitted with solar panels that will generate power for the spacecraft after launch. The spacecraft’s instrument enclosure, which houses the telescope and sensitive infrared cameras, will be located behind the sunshade, allowing the spacecraft to detect and track near-Earth objects that would otherwise be hidden by the Sun’s glare. Targeting launch in late 2027, the NEO Surveyor mission is led by Professor Amy Mainzer at the University of California, Los Angeles for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and is being managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems and the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, 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 IPAC at Caltech 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/