The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEOS) 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 (SEL1) 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, NEOS will discover ∼200,000 - 300,000 new near-Earth objects down to sizes as small as ∼10 m and thousands of comets, significantly improving our understanding of the probability of an Earth impact over the next century.