NEO Surveyor’s Spacecraft Bus Undergoes Testing

The bus structure of the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor spacecraft underwent testing at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2025. NEO Surveyor’s bus houses the power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems, which are isolated from the spacecraft’s telescope and sensitive detectors. When all components are assembled, a large sunshade will be attached to the side of the bus, blocking the Sun’s glare from entering the telescope. 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 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/