Skip to main content

NASA Makes Asteroid Defense a Priority, Moving its NEO Surveyor Mission Into the Development Phase

There’s an old adage in the engineering field – what gets funded gets built. So it’s sure to be a happy time over at the Planetary Society, as NEO Surveyor, the project the organization has primarily supported over the past few years, has made it through NASA’s grueling budgetary process to reach the “development” stage, with an eye for a launch of the system in 2028.

NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey for objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system. 

Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the Sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique. With the increased focus on “planetary defense,” as it has come to be called, NASA has been interested in the mission, which was initially proposed in 2005, for some time.

UT has plenty of content on how we protect ourselves from asteroids. The first step is always to find them.

But, as with all bureaucracies, NASA has budgetary difficulties, and NEO Surveyor was no exception. The agency originally canceled NEO Surveyor’s budget for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, forcing project scientists and engineers to move on to other projects for their salaries. So when NASA again picked up the bill for the project, it had ballooned to $1.2 billion, partly due to the increased inflation throughout the economy in the intervening years.

Despite that price hike, the Planetary Society expects Congress to support the mission, in part thanks to more than 5,000 people who wrote their local representatives on behalf of the project. In a further show of support, the seemingly unrelated CHIPS and Science act passed by Congress earlier this year forces NASA into no longer cutting programs funding even if there are cost overruns on other programs (like, for example, the JWST). 

Now with funding secured, the mission moves on to building and testing flight hardware as the third part of the five-step NASA project cycle. At the end of this “Phase C,” all of the hardware should be ready for final assembly and testing. But there’s still a long way, and potentially some of its own cost overruns, to go before NEO Surveyor is officially in space and collecting valuable data on our immediate planetary neighborhood. But for now, the project appears on track to deliver those helpful data points, if slightly later than its proponents had hoped for.

Watch this discussion of the NEO Surveyor Mission if you’d like to learn more, featuring Amy Mainzer, who originally proposed the mission.
Credit – Tuscon Amateur Astronomy Association YouTube Channel

Learn More:
Planetary Society – NEO Surveyor is confirmed
UT – NASA has Approved a Space Telescope That Will Scan the Skies for Dangerous Near-Earth Asteroids
UT – Astronomers Have Found More Than 30,000 Near-Earth Asteroids… so far
UT – Three New Potentially Hazardous Asteroids Discovered, Including a big one That Measures 1.5 km Across

Lead Image:
Artist’s concept of the NEO Surveyor mission.
Credit – NASA / JPL-Caltech/The Planetary Society

The post NASA Makes Asteroid Defense a Priority, Moving its NEO Surveyor Mission Into the Development Phase appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/xhI0mQN
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Data and Machine Learning has Kicked SETI Into High Gear

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...
Post a Comment
Read more

The First Close-Up Picture of Star Outside the Milky Way

Like a performer preparing for their big finale, a distant star is shedding its outer layers and preparing to explode as a supernova. Astronomers have been observing the huge star, named WOH G64, since its discovery in the 1970s. It’s one of the largest known stars, and also one of the most luminous and massive red supergiants (RSGs). The star is surrounded by an envelope of expelled star-stuff, which could indicate it’s getting ready to explode. WOH G64 isn’t in the Milky Way; it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy. Getting these detailed image is quite a feat for the ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer. It’s also quite an accomplishment for the team of scientists behind the image. They’ve published their images and the results of their observations of the star in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Their research is titled “ Imaging the innermost circumstellar environment of the red supergiant WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Planetary Surfaces: Why study them? Can they help us find life elsewhere?

Universe Today recently explored the importance of studying impact craters and what they can teach us about finding life beyond Earth. Impact craters are considered one of the many surface processes—others include volcanism, weathering, erosion, and plate tectonics—that shape surfaces on numerous planetary bodies, with all of them simultaneously occurring on Earth. Here, we will explore how and why planetary scientists study planetary surfaces, the challenges faced when studying other planetary surfaces, what planetary surfaces can teach us about finding life, and how upcoming students can pursue studying planetary surfaces, as well. So, why is it so important to study planetary surfaces throughout the solar system? “Planetary surfaces record the history of the Solar System, a history that’s almost entirely lost to us here on Earth,” Dr. Paul Byrne, who is an Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, tells  Uni...
Post a Comment
Read more