NEO Surveyor Trajectory Design and Launch Period Analysis

Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is an infrared telescope in development designed to significantly increase humanity’s catalog and understanding of large, potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in September 2027 and will conduct observations from a Sun-Earth L1 halo orbit. This paper outlines a robust framework for leveraging multi-body dynamics to compute ballistic end-to-end baseline trajectories from Earth to a desired survey orbit subject to various NEO Surveyor mission constraints. The strategy is applied across launch periods of arbitrary duration to analyze trajectory characteristics and launch availability as a function of date and various launch injection parameters.