NEO Surveyor’s Spacecraft Bus on the ‘Shaker Table’

The bus structure for NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is installed on a “shaker table” at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, during vibration testing conducted in August 2025. Mass simulators that mimic the weight and size of the spacecraft’s telescope and sunshade are also attached to the bus for the test. These mass simulators help engineers simulate the conditions flight components will experience during launch so their durability can be verified. 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 Space & Mission 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/