Live From the Clean Room — Building NEO Surveyor

Watch as NASA’s next planetary defense mission comes together at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. 

What You're Watching

Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is an infrared space telescope being built to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts — the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.

You are viewing activities in the High Bay 1 clean room at JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility. Over the coming weeks, the large panels, cabling, and other components for NEO Surveyor’s instrument enclosure will take shape. In the center of the clean room is a platform, called the Medium Articulating Assembly Dolly (MAAD), which is designed to support the instrument enclosure, where components will be assembled and mounted.

The enclosure is a key part of the spacecraft, housing NEO Surveyor’s powerful telescope and infrared instrumentation. When completed and tested, the enclosure will be mounted to the back of the spacecraft’s large sunshield and avionics for the mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2027.

The telescope, which is being built in another clean room at JPL, has an aperture of nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters) — larger than NASA’s previous asteroid-hunting space telescope, NEOWISE — and it will collect infrared light from some of the most difficult-to-find near-Earth objects in the solar system. Additional construction and testing will take place at JPL and partner institutions across the United States.

Learn More

  • More About the Mission

    How will NEO Surveyor seek and find near-Earth objects, such as undiscovered comets and dim, elusive asteroids?

  • An illustration of the NEO Surveyor spacecraft floating in a green and yellow starfield. The spacecraft has a silver back and a black top.

    How Is NEO Surveyor Being Assembled?

    Learn more about the NEO Surveyor spacecraft, and its infrared telescope.

A flatbed tractor-trailer drives from right to left, in front of a campus of tall, pale-colored buIldings amid scattered trees. The building in front lacks any visible windows, but sports a large, circular NASA logo, larger than the truck tractor. On the flatbed trailer, a very large, boxy object is shrouded in a gray tarpaulin, which has red and white warning stripes at the front and back, looking like large candy canes.
Work on NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor has begun at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; the first mission designed specifically to hunt comets and asteroids that could threaten Earth, it’s scheduled to launch in 2027, at the earliest. In the image above, a truck arrives at JPL on June 3, 2024, to deliver the Medium Articulating Transportation System (MATS), which will be used during the construction and transportation of components for NEO Surveyor. Originating at the aerospace company Beyond Gravity in Vienna, Austria, the MATS traveled via ship through the Panama Canal to Port Hueneme, California, before arriving by road at JPL. Construction has begun on NEO Surveyor's instrument enclosure in the High Bay 1 clean room at JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility. When the enclosure is complete later this year, it will be moved inside the MATS to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for environmental testing. The MATS is a transportable clean room with its own filtration and climate control systems that keep the spacecraft and components clean, stable, and safe while being moved between facilities.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
In a cavernous, bright white, sparkling clean room, workers wearing white coats, hair nets, blue pants, and white booties over their shoes stand and watch a large, white, metal-looking box suspended beneath an enormous crane, which runs on yellow tracks spanning the room, with orange straps supporting the weight of the box.
At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, on June 7, 2024, clean room technicians use a crane to lift the lid of the Medium Articulating Transportation System (MATS), which will be used to build and transport components for NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission. Inside the MATS is the Medium Articulating Assembly Dolly (MAAD), a platform that will support the spacecraft's instrument enclosure, which is being constructed inside the High Bay 1 clean room at JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility. The instrument enclosure contains NEO Surveyor’s telescope, mirrors, and infrared sensors that will be used to detect, track, and characterize the most hazardous near-Earth objects, such as large asteroids or comets that could threaten our planet. NEO Surveyor is scheduled to launch no sooner than 2027.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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