Author Topic: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)  (Read 23010 times)

Offline arachnitect

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #40 on: 11/30/2022 11:46 pm »
This is a JPL mission. They are trying to manage budget and industrial base shortages. I suspect that NEOS is on the losing side of the trade offs that need to be made.

It is good to see that Congress cares about the mission.
The review board was clear. No new missions until the engineering staffing to projects ratio is fixed (and that's more than just hiring new engineering bodies; they have to become effective within the JPL culture and on their particular projects).

NEOS currently isn't a mission in development, so it would fall under that rule.

How is JPL involved and do they need to be? This mission came out of Univ. of Arizona

Offline vjkane

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #41 on: 12/01/2022 04:40 am »
This is a JPL mission. They are trying to manage budget and industrial base shortages. I suspect that NEOS is on the losing side of the trade offs that need to be made.

It is good to see that Congress cares about the mission.
The review board was clear. No new missions until the engineering staffing to projects ratio is fixed (and that's more than just hiring new engineering bodies; they have to become effective within the JPL culture and on their particular projects).

NEOS currently isn't a mission in development, so it would fall under that rule.

How is JPL involved and do they need to be? This mission came out of Univ. of Arizona
UA can't design, build, and test a spacecraft. Universities team with either a NASA center or a commercial spacecraft partner such as Lockheed. The higher tech the spacecraft from what I've observed, the more likely to go with a NASA center. (And while it isn't a NASA center, John Hopkin's APL is an exception in the university world and has exceptional technical capabilities and is this sense the equivalent of a NASA technical center.)

UA probably early in the proposal stage decided to team with JPL. I seem to remember that the sensors required significant technical development.

Offline Rondaz

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #42 on: 12/06/2022 11:16 pm »
NASA’s NEO Surveyor Successfully Passes Key Milestone

jahandal Posted on December 6, 2022

Agency officials have completed a rigorous technical and programmatic review, known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), and confirmed NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) – the next flight mission out of the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) –  establishing NASA’s commitment to the mission’s technical, cost, and schedule baseline. The decision commits NASA to a development cost baseline of $1.2 billion and a commitment to be ready for a launch no later than June 2028. The cost and schedule commitments outlined at KDP-C align the NEO Surveyor mission with program management best practices that account for potential technical risks and budgetary uncertainty beyond the development project’s control.

NEO Surveyor is an infrared space telescope designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts by expediting our ability to discover and characterize at least 90% of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit, collectively known as near-earth objects, or NEOs. NEO Surveyor’s successful completion of this review furthers NASA’s commitment to planetary defense and the search for NEOs that could one day pose an impact threat to Earth.

The flight mission, which falls under the agency’s Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission directorate, is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and the survey investigation is led by the University of Arizona. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center provides NEO Surveyor program management, and program oversight is provided by the PDCO, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency‘s ongoing efforts in Planetary Defense.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/neosurveyor/2022/12/06/nasas-neo-surveyor-successfully-passes-key-milestone/


Offline su27k

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #43 on: 12/07/2022 03:21 am »
https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/asteroid-hunting-telescope-clears-nasa-review-but-two-year-delay-hikes-cost/

Quote
A NASA infrared space telescope specifically designed to locate Earth-threatening asteroids and comets cleared a critical review last week and is now an official NASA program. NASA announced today that the Near Earth Object Surveyor is approved to move into Phase C of development, but with a two-year delay from 2026 to 2028 and associated cost increase. Instead of $500-600 million, it is now $1.2 billion not including launch.

Offline yg1968

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #44 on: 12/07/2022 12:38 pm »

Offline Rondaz

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #45 on: 12/07/2022 05:51 pm »
UPDATE:

@NASA’s NEO Surveyor mission, an infrared space telescope designed to accelerate our ability to find near-Earth asteroids, has officially been confirmed as a NASA mission! NEO Surveyor is being developed by @NASAJPL & led by @UArizonaLPL. 

https://twitter.com/AsteroidWatch/status/1600234490139271168

Offline jbenton

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #46 on: 12/15/2022 04:21 pm »
[snip]
How is JPL involved and do they need to be? This mission came out of Univ. of Arizona

Dr. Amy Mainzer – the PI of the NEO Surveyor and long-time leader of the NEOCam proposals – had been an employee of JPL, but moved to UA LPL soon before NEO SM was approved. (While NEOCam was being considered as a Discovery Program mission, she was with JPL):
https://science.nasa.gov/science-committee/members/dr-amy-mainzer
According to this article published around the time it was approved, she said they were working on how to sort that out:
https://spacenews.com/nasa-to-develop-mission-to-search-for-near-earth-asteroids/

I don't know how many other team members were with JPL at the time, if any others were already with UA LPL or if any had changed employers since.
I also don’t know what the exact division of labor between JPL and UA is although, the statement in the link that Rondaz posted, that the mission is “JPL developed, UA led” makes me think that a pretty substantial chunk of the workload is still at JPL.

[snip] I seem to remember that the sensors required significant technical development.
I distinctly remember reading something like this back in 2013:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/multimedia/pia16955.html
At the time I think I read several sources saying it was a big deal that this was an infrared sensor that didn't need cryogenic cooling to be effective.

The space policy article posted upthread said that the Congressmembers who signed that letter had asked for a response to it by the end of that week regarding the "unacceptable" two-year delay. Has anyone heard any news about that?

Online Targeteer

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #47 on: 12/29/2022 07:52 am »
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/construction-begins-on-nasa-s-next-generation-asteroid-hunter


Dec 22, 2022
Construction Begins on NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Hunter
NASA’s NEO Surveyor is seen in this illustration

NEO Surveyor is the first purpose-built space telescope that will advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts by finding and tracking hazardous near-Earth objects.

    All about NASA’s next-generation asteroid impact monitoring system

    NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids

A space telescope designed to search for the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that stray into Earth’s orbital neighborhood, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) recently passed a rigorous technical and programmatic review. Now the mission is transitioning into the final design-and-fabrication phase and establishing its technical, cost, and schedule baseline.

The mission supports the objectives of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 directed NASA to discover and characterize at least 90% of the near-Earth objects more than 140 meters (460 feet) across that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit. Objects of this size are capable of causing significant regional damage, or worse, should they impact the Earth.

“NEO Surveyor represents the next generation for NASA’s ability to quickly detect, track, and characterize potentially hazardous near-Earth objects,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer at PDCO. “Ground-based telescopes remain essential for us to continually watch the skies, but a space-based infrared observatory is the ultimate high ground that will enable NASA’s planetary defense strategy.”

Find Them First

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, NEO Surveyor will journey a million miles to a region of gravitational stability – called the L1 Lagrange point – between Earth and the Sun, where the spacecraft will orbit during its five-year primary mission.

From this location, the NEO Surveyor will view the solar system in infrared wavelengths – light that is invisible to the human eye. Because those wavelengths are mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, larger ground-based observatories may miss near-Earth objects that this space telescope will be able to spot by using its modest light-collecting aperture of nearly 20 inches (50 centimeters).

NEO Surveyor’s cutting-edge detectors are designed to observe two heat-sensitive infrared bands that were chosen specifically so the spacecraft can track the most challenging-to-find near-Earth objects, such as dark asteroids and comets that don’t reflect much visible light. In the infrared wavelengths to which NEO Surveyor is sensitive, these objects glow because they are heated by sunlight.

In addition, NEO Surveyor will be able to find asteroids that approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, as well as those that lead and trail our planet’s orbit, where they are typically obscured by the glare of sunlight – objects known as Earth Trojans.

“For the first time in our planet’s history, Earth’s inhabitants are developing methods to protect Earth by deflecting hazardous asteroids,” said Amy Mainzer, the mission’s survey director at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But before we can deflect them, we first need to find them. NEO Surveyor will be a game-changer in that effort.”

The mission will also help to characterize the composition, shape, rotation, and orbit of near-Earth objects. While the mission’s primary focus is on planetary defense, this information can be used to better understand the origins and evolution of asteroids and comets, which formed the ancient building blocks of our solar system.

When it launches, NEO Surveyor will build upon the successes of its predecessor, the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). Repurposed from the WISE space telescope after that mission ended in 2011, NEOWISE proved highly effective at detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects, but NEO Surveyor is the first space mission built specifically to find large numbers of these hazardous asteroids and comets.

Already in the Works

After the mission passed this milestone on Nov. 29, key instrument development got under way. For instance, the large radiators that will allow the system to be passively cooled are being fabricated. To detect the faint infrared glow of asteroids and comets, the instrument’s infrared detectors need to be much cooler than the spacecraft’s electronics. The radiators will perform that important task, eliminating the need for complex active cooling systems.

Additionally, construction of the composite struts that will separate the telescope’s instrumentation from the spacecraft has begun. Designed to be poor heat conductors, the struts will isolate the cold instrument from the warm spacecraft and sunshield, the latter of which will block sunlight that might otherwise obscure the telescope’s view of near-Earth objects and heat up the instrument.

Progress has also been made developing the instrument’s infrared detectors, beam splitters, filters, electronics, and enclosure. And work has begun on the space telescope’s mirror, which will be formed from a solid block of aluminum and shaped by a custom-built diamond-turning machine.

“The project team, including all of our institutional and industrial collaborators, is already very busy designing and fabricating components that will ultimately become flight hardware,” said Tom Hoffman, NEO Surveyor project manager at JPL. “As the mission enters this new phase, we’re excited to be working on this unique space telescope and are already looking forward to our launch and the start of our important mission.”

More About the Mission

The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the PDCO, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.

The project is being developed by JPL and is led by survey director Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including Ball Aerospace , Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information about NEO Surveyor is available at:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/neo-surveyor

« Last Edit: 12/29/2022 07:54 am by Targeteer »
Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

Offline su27k

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #48 on: 01/25/2023 10:29 am »
https://twitter.com/SpcPlcyOnline/status/1618013061905883139

Quote
1/2  At SBAG, Q comes up abt pricetag of NEO Surveyor growing from ~$600M to $1.2B. How do we in community explain it to others?
Lori Glaze, NASA Plan Sci Div Dir,  says she (i.e. NASA HQ) will take ownership of that bc it's due to delays caused by HQ.



2/2 Survey Director Amy Mainzer adds: This is a problem we know how to solve. How many global problems do we know how to solve for $1 billion?

Offline ttle2

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #49 on: 01/25/2023 03:07 pm »
It does sound shockingly expensive for a such a small passively cooled telescope with a single instrument (even if the camera is large for IR).

Offline deadman1204

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #50 on: 01/25/2023 03:13 pm »
It does sound shockingly expensive for a such a small passively cooled telescope with a single instrument (even if the camera is large for IR).
Delaying projects hugely inflates costs. JWST's cost was significantly impacted by budget delays (read over a billion dollars). EVERYONE involved in the project needs to stay on the payroll until their part is done. If it takes 3x longer to do that stuff, you have to pay them all that time. Personal is one of if not the biggest cost of building space craft.

So cutting 10% can increase cost 30% overall. Congress usually just doesn't care
« Last Edit: 01/25/2023 03:13 pm by deadman1204 »

Offline ttle2

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #51 on: 01/25/2023 03:16 pm »
It does sound shockingly expensive for a such a small passively cooled telescope with a single instrument (even if the camera is large for IR).
Delaying projects hugely inflates costs. JWST's cost was significantly impacted by budget delays (read over a billion dollars). EVERYONE involved in the project needs to stay on the payroll until their part is done. If it takes 3x longer to do that stuff, you have to pay them all that time. Personal is one of if not the biggest cost of building space craft.

So cutting 10% can increase cost 30% overall. Congress usually just doesn't care

Even $600 million sounded kinda steep, almost twice what WISE cost.

Online Blackstar

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #52 on: 01/25/2023 06:12 pm »

Online Blackstar

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #53 on: 01/25/2023 06:13 pm »
This is from Arecibo:

Online Comga

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #54 on: 01/25/2023 08:57 pm »
In regards to the first slide:
H2RG detectors are mature, established technology, even with the substrate removed.  (circa 2007?)
Sidecar ASICs are mature, established technology.
Cryogenic IR beamsplitters are mature, established technology.
Cryogenic to ambient flex cables are mature, established technology.
The optical configuration, not discussed here, is new, but not remarkably large, and the technology is mature and established.
Been there, flown that.  (approximately)

I don't get the enormous cost, or the doubling for two or three year delay.
And saying that "solving a world problem is worth a billion dollars" is reprehensible and very self-important.

PS  What is the significance of the Arecibo slide?
They hit their stride finding more than 20 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) each year.
(In every direction because there was no problem for radar observations to point inward in the solar system, unlike optical observations.)
Was it that the unaffordable cost of rebuilding Arecibo would be a fraction of the increase in cost of NEOS?
What kind of wastrels would dump a perfectly good booster in the ocean after just one use?

Online Blackstar

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #55 on: 01/25/2023 08:59 pm »
Even $600 million sounded kinda steep, almost twice what WISE cost.

There's a lot of mud in the numbers being thrown around. I think some of the early numbers did not include launch costs, and they may have also excluded the Phase E (operations) costs. So the costs are not always comparing the same things. Also, some of the delays came at very bad times in terms of their effects on costs. (Put differently, if the delay had been announced a few months earlier, the cost impact would have been lower.) Finally, there is a lot that was going on behind the scenes in terms of programmatic decisions at HQ that has not become public, and probably never will, and that drove up the costs.

Offline ttle2

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #56 on: 01/26/2023 08:52 pm »
In regards to the first slide:
H2RG detectors are mature, established technology, even with the substrate removed.  (circa 2007?)
Sidecar ASICs are mature, established technology.
Cryogenic IR beamsplitters are mature, established technology.
Cryogenic to ambient flex cables are mature, established technology.
The optical configuration, not discussed here, is new, but not remarkably large, and the technology is mature and established.
Been there, flown that.  (approximately)

I don't get the enormous cost, or the doubling for two or three year delay.
And saying that "solving a world problem is worth a billion dollars" is reprehensible and very self-important.

PS  What is the significance of the Arecibo slide?
They hit their stride finding more than 20 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) each year.
(In every direction because there was no problem for radar observations to point inward in the solar system, unlike optical observations.)
Was it that the unaffordable cost of rebuilding Arecibo would be a fraction of the increase in cost of NEOS?

I think the Arecibo slide shows known asteroids that were detected with Arecibo radar, not newly found ones. Otherwise "attempted" doesn't make sense (nor does searching for asteroids with Arecibo in the first place).

Offline deadman1204

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #57 on: 01/30/2023 03:30 pm »
Even $600 million sounded kinda steep, almost twice what WISE cost.

There's a lot of mud in the numbers being thrown around. I think some of the early numbers did not include launch costs, and they may have also excluded the Phase E (operations) costs. So the costs are not always comparing the same things. Also, some of the delays came at very bad times in terms of their effects on costs. (Put differently, if the delay had been announced a few months earlier, the cost impact would have been lower.) Finally, there is a lot that was going on behind the scenes in terms of programmatic decisions at HQ that has not become public, and probably never will, and that drove up the costs.
Thats right. Won't it be a little harder to compare new mission prices to any existing ones since the decadal brought up the idea of including phase E costs into the original cost? And all existing/previous missions didn't have to account for that?

Online Blackstar

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #58 on: 01/30/2023 03:39 pm »
Thats right. Won't it be a little harder to compare new mission prices to any existing ones since the decadal brought up the idea of including phase E costs into the original cost? And all existing/previous missions didn't have to account for that?

I actually don't think it's a good idea in general to compare new mission prices to existing ones, because often the assumptions have changed and you're not comparing the same missions. The important thing is what are you going to spend now, and how does that affect all the other things in your budget and in your plans? Can you afford the cost now?

But the Phase E thing has only been excluded for a few years. It used to be included, then it was excluded, and now it's going to be back in again. I don't remember the dates when that changed (although, ironically, I was involved in the studies that included recommendations for changing it...).
« Last Edit: 01/30/2023 03:39 pm by Blackstar »

Online Blackstar

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Re: NASA - Near Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS)
« Reply #59 on: 02/16/2023 07:11 pm »
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-asteroid-blast-that-shook-the-world-is-still-making-an-impact1/?fbclid=IwAR0wBPs8KrMcI-nvRUD7bi4ve86-6Atcxidi09-ll7sH6KhQmzHOoHdOm5A

The Asteroid Blast That Shook the World Is Still Making an Impact
The Chelyabinsk asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 10 years ago, the largest impact in over a century

    By Phil Plait on February 15, 2023

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