NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor’s Large Sunshade Takes Shape | JPL

NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor’s Large Sunshade Takes Shape  | JPL

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, housing 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.

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.

NASA/JPL Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) emblem

The infrared Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize 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.

NEO Surveyor will launch no earlier than September 2027.

NEO Surveyor consists of a single scientific instrument: a 50 centimeter (nearly 20 inch) diameter telescope that operates in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting bright and dark asteroids—the most difficult type to find.

After launch, NEO Surveyor will carry out a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (460 feet). These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. By using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, NEO Surveyor can make accurate measurements of NEO sizes and gain valuable information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.

NEO Surveyor employs an innovative observation strategy to independently discover new asteroids and comets and determine their orbits with enough accuracy to allow them to be found again. In five years of survey operation, NEO Surveyor is designed to make significant progress toward meeting the United States Congress' mandate to NASA to find more than 90 percent of all NEOs larger than 140 meters in diameter.

NASA's NEO Surveyor will build upon the successes of NEOWISE as the first space mission built specifically to find large numbers of hazardous asteroids and comets. The space telescope will launch to a region of gravitational stability between the Earth and the Sun called the L1 Lagrange point, where the spacecraft will orbit during its five-year primary mission. From this location, the space telescope will view the solar system in infrared wavelengths and light that is invisible to the human eye. Because those wavelengths are mostly blocked by Earth's atmosphere, larger ground-based observatories may miss near-Earth objects that NEO Surveyor will be able to spot from space by using its modest light-collecting aperture of nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters).

NEO Surveyor's advanced detectors are designed to observe two heat-sensitive infrared bands that were chosen specifically so the spacecraft can track the most challenging-to-find near-Earth objects, such as dark asteroids and comets that do not reflect much visible light. In the infrared wavelengths that NEO Surveyor is sensitive to, these objects glow as they are heated by sunlight. In addition, NEO Surveyor will be able to find asteroids that approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, as well as those that lead and trail our planet's orbit, where they are typically obscured by the glare of sunlight—objects known as Earth Trojans.

The mission is tasked by NASA's Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), established in 2016 to manage the agency's ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA's Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.

The project is being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and is led by survey director Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including Ball Aerospace, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission's data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NEO Surveyor Mission: 
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/near-earth-object-surveyor/

JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS): https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/

Planetary Defense at NASA: 
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense

Image Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Image Date: Dec. 5, 2025

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