The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

TL;DR

The NEO Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory at Sun-Earth L1 designed to discover and characterize near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters, aiming to identify potential impact hazards within a five-year survey.

Contribution

This paper introduces the NEO Surveyor mission, detailing its design, objectives, and expected impact on near-Earth object detection and hazard assessment.

Findings

Will discover 200,000-300,000 new NEOs

Detects objects as small as 10 meters

Improves impact risk understanding

Abstract

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory designed to discover and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The mission's primary objective is to find the majority of objects large enough to cause severe regional impact damage ($>$140 m in effective spherical diameter) within its five-year baseline survey. Operating at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, the mission will survey to within 45 degrees of the Sun in an effort to find the objects in the most Earth-like orbits. The survey cadence is optimized to provide observational arcs long enough to reliably distinguish near-Earth objects from more distant small bodies that cannot pose an impact hazard. Over the course of its survey, NEO Surveyor will discover $\sim$200,000 - 300,000 new NEOs down to sizes as small as $\sim$10 m and thousands of comets, significantly improving our understanding of the probability of an Earth impact over the next century.