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NEO Surveyor

Near-Earth Object Surveyor

Overview: NEO Surveyor is a new mission that is designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth. NEO Surveyor consists of an infrared telescope and wide-field camera operating at thermal infrared wavelengths. NEO Surveyor's primary science objectives are to assess the present-day risk of near-Earth object (NEO) impact, study the origin and ultimate fate of our solar system's asteroids, and find the most suitable NEO targets for future exploration by robots and humans. The NEO Surveyor mission has been funded for development by NASA, with a launch date of no later than June 2028.

IPAC is the NEO Surveyor Survey Data Center, building upon its long heritage supporting NASA's major infrared sky surveys and detecting and characterizing small bodies in the solar system.  IPAC is responsible for NEO Surveyor survey data processing and archiving of the final survey and engineering data products.  IPAC distributes NEO Surveyor image and extracted source data via the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, and works with the IAU Minor Planet Center and NASA Planetary Data System to release solar system object detections and physical characterizations to the science community.