NEO Surveyor’s Bus Structure Attached With Mass Simulators

NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor sunshade mass simulator (the gray paneling to the right of the photo) is attached to the spacecraft’s bus structure in August 2025 at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado. The angular assembly attached to the top of the bus via a system of struts is the instrument mass simulator. Mass simulators are used to replicate the weight and size of flight hardware during testing. 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/