By Vidhi Thacker
NASA has signed a contract with SpaceX for its Near-Earth Object Surveyor spacecraft. This craft will identify asteroids and comets that could threaten Earth. The mission will launch from Florida’s Space Coast using a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 2027. The contract and services are valued at approximately 100 million dollars. The spacecraft will help improve efforts to protect our planet by finding and studying near-Earth objects that could cause serious damage if they hit. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will operate this mission with the support of various other scientists and institutions.
NASA reports that the NEO Surveyor will be located at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. From this spot, the spacecraft will use its 50-centimeter infrared telescope to scan space in two infrared wavelengths. This will help detect bright and dark asteroids, including ones that are hard to see with current Earth-based telescopes. The main aim of this mission is to locate at least two-thirds of the unknown NEOs measuring 140 meters or more in diameter, which are large enough to cause harm if they collide.
The NEO Surveyor mission continues the work of previous efforts to protect our planet from asteroids. In 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This mission successfully hit the asteroid Dimorphos to see if we can change an asteroid’s path. In 2024, the European Space Agency launched the Hera mission, also using a Falcon 9 rocket. Hera’s goal is to study the effects of the DART impact on the Didymos system. All these missions are an ongoing effort to develop technologies that can reduce asteroid threats in the future.