NEO Surveyor’s Aluminum Telescope Mounted to Its Flight Base

The aluminum telescope of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is shown here attached its flight base frame at a Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) clean room in Logan, Utah, in early September 2025. The telescope is connected via a system of struts that prevent heat from passing from the spacecraft to the instrument, keeping it secure, isolated, and cool. The spacecraft’s instrument enclosure will later be fitted over the instrumentation and then the pair will be attached to the spacecraft bus and sunshade. With an aperture of nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters), the telescope features detectors sensitive to two infrared wavelengths in which near-Earth objects re-radiate solar heat. The instrument enclosure is designed to ensure heat produced by the spacecraft and instrument during operations doesn’t interfere with its infrared observations. 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/