NASA Awards Planetary Defense Space Telescope Launch Services Contract

NASA has selected SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, to provide launch services for the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, which will detect and observe asteroids and comets that could potentially pose an impact threat to Earth.

The firm fixed price launch service task order is being awarded under the indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity NASA Launch Services II contract. The total cost to NASA for the launch service is approximately $100 million, which includes the launch service and other mission related costs. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeted to launch no earlier than September 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

The NEO Surveyor mission consists of a single scientific instrument: an almost 20-inch (50-centimeter) diameter telescope that will operate in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting both bright and dark asteroids, the latter being the most difficult type to find with existing assets. The space telescope is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. These are collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs.

The mission will carry out a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the unknown NEOs larger than 140 meters (460 feet). These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. By using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, the telescope can also make more accurate measurements of the sizes of NEOs and gain information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.

The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Program oversight is provided by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, provides program management for NEO Surveyor. The project is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Multiple aerospace and engineering companies are contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems SMS (Space & Mission Systems), Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will support operations, and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Mission team leadership includes the University of California, Los Angeles. NASA’s Launch Services Program at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for managing the launch service.

For more information about NEO Surveyor, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/

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Tiernan Doyle / Joshua Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1100
tiernan.doyle@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov

Patti Bielling
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-501-7575
patricia.a.bielling@nasa.gov

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Tiernan P. Doyle

NASA Awards Delivery Order for NOAA’s Space Weather Program

NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has awarded a delivery order to BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, to build spacecraft for the Lagrange 1 Series project as a part of NOAA’s Space Weather Next program.

The award made under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition IV contract, has a total value of approximately $230.6 million with the period of performance running from February 2025 to February 2035. The work will take place at the awardee’s facility in Boulder.

The firm-fixed-price delivery order covers all phases of the Lagrange 1 Series project operations including developing up to two spacecraft, instrument integration, satellite-level testing, training and support for the spacecraft flight operations team, and mission operations support. Rapid IV contracts serve as a fast and flexible means for the government to acquire spacecraft and related components, equipment, and services in support of NASA missions and other federal government agencies.

The Space Weather Next program will maintain and extend space weather observations from various orbitally stable points such as Lagrange 1, which is about a million miles from Earth. The first Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 Series launch, planned in 2029, will be the first observatory under the program and will provide continuity of real-time coronal imagery and upstream solar wind measurements. Space Weather Next will provide uninterrupted data continuity when NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 mission comes to its end of operations.

Observations of the Sun and the near-Earth space environment are important to protecting our technological infrastructure both on the ground and in space. The spacecraft will provide critical data to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center which issues forecasts, warnings and alerts that help mitigate space weather impacts, including electric power outages and interruption to communications and navigation systems.

NASA and NOAA oversee the development, launch, testing, and operation of all the satellites in the Lagrange 1 Series project. NOAA is the program owner providing the requirements and funding along with managing the program, operations, data products, and dissemination to users. NASA and its commercial partners develop and build the instruments, spacecraft, and provide launch services on behalf of NOAA.

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

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Karen Fox/Liz Vlock
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov

Jeremy Eggers
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
757-824-2958
jeremy.l.eggers@nasa.gov

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Tiernan P. Doyle

Hubble Spies a Spiral That May Be Hiding an Imposter

The sparkling spiral galaxy gracing this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is UGC 5460, which sits about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. This image combines four different wavelengths of light to reveal UGC 5460’s central bar of stars, winding spiral arms, and bright blue star clusters. Also captured in the upper left-hand corner is a far closer object: a star just 577 light-years away in our own galaxy.

UGC 5460 has hosted two recent supernovae: SN 2011ht and SN 2015as. It’s because of these two stellar explosions that Hubble targeted this galaxy, collecting data for three observing programs that aim to study various kinds of supernovae.

SN 2015as was as a core-collapse supernova: a cataclysmic explosion that happens when the core of a star far more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity, initiating a rebound of material outside the core. Hubble observations of SN 2015as will help researchers understand what happens when the expanding shockwave of a supernova collides with the gas that surrounds the exploded star.

SN 2011ht might have been a core-collapse supernova as well, but it could also be an impostor called a luminous blue variable. Luminous blue variables are rare stars that experience eruptions so large that they can mimic supernovae. Crucially, luminous blue variables emerge from these eruptions unscathed, while stars that go supernova do not. Hubble will search for a stellar survivor at SN 2011ht’s location with the goal of revealing the explosion’s origin.

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Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD

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Sols 4458-4460: Winter Schminter

Earth planning date: Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025

During today’s unusual-for-MSL Tuesday planning day (because of the U.S. holiday on Monday), we planned activities under new winter heating constraints. Operating Curiosity on Mars requires attention to a number of factors — power, data volume, terrain roughness, temperature — that affect rover operability and safety. Winter means more heating to warm up the gears and mechanisms within the rover and the instruments, but energy that goes to heating means less energy for science observations. Nevertheless, we (and Curiosity) were up to the task of balancing heating and science, and planned enough observations to warm the science team’s hearts. 

We fit in DRT, APXS, and MAHLI on two different bedrock targets, “Chumash Trail” and “Wheeler Gorge,” which have different fracturing and layering features. In the workspace, ChemCam targeted a clean vertical exposure of layered bedrock at “Sierra Madre” and a lumpy-looking patch of resistant nodules at “Chiquito Basin.” 

The topography of the local terrain and our end-of-drive position after the weekend fortuitously lined up to give us a view of an exposure of the Marker Band, which we first explored on the other side of Gediz Vallis Ridge. Having a view of another exposure of this distinctive horizon helps give us further insight into its origin, so we included both RMI and Mastcam mosaics of the exposure. 

Documenting a feature that, unlike the Marker Band, has been and will be in our sights for a long time — “Texoli” butte (pictured above) — was the goal of additional Mastcam and ChemCam imaging. Observations of potential sedimentary structures on the flank of Texoli motivated acquisition of an RMI mosaic, and a chance to capture structures along its southeast face inspired a Mastcam mosaic. Good exposures of additional nearby bedrock structures at “Mount Lukens” and “Chantry Flat” drew the eye of Mastcam, while another small mosaic focused on the kind of linear troughs in the sand we often see bordering bedrock slabs. Environmental observations included Navcam cloud and dust-devil movies, Mastcam observations of dust in the atmosphere, and REMS and RAD measurements spread across the three sols of the plan.

Written by Michelle Minitti, Planetary Geologist at Framework

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Guiding Orion: Jorge Chong’s Mission to Advance Deep Space Exploration 

Jorge Chong is helping shape the future of human spaceflight, one calculation at a time. As a project manager for TRON (Tracking and Ranging via Optical Navigation) and a guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) test engineer in the Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division, he is leading efforts to ensure the Orion spacecraft can navigate deep space autonomously. 

“GNC is like the brain of a spacecraft. It involves a suite of sensors that keep track of where the vehicle is in orbit so it can return home safely,” he said. “Getting to test the components of a GNC system makes you very familiar with how it all works together, and then to see it fly and help it operate successfully is immensely rewarding.” 

His work is critical to the Artemis campaign, which aims to return humans to the Moon and pave the way for Mars. From developing optical navigation technology that allows Orion to determine its position using images of Earth and the Moon to testing docking cameras and Light Detection and Ranging systems that enable autonomous spacecraft rendezvous, Chong is pushing the limits of exploration. He also runs high-fidelity flight simulations at Lockheed Martin’s Orion Test Hardware facility in Houston, ensuring Orion’s software is ready for the demands of spaceflight. 

Chong’s NASA career spans seven years as a full-time engineer, plus three years as a co-op student at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. In 2024, he began leading Project TRON, an optical navigation initiative funded by a $2 million Early Career Initiative award. The project aims to advance autonomous space navigation—an essential capability for missions beyond Earth’s orbit. 

Thanks to Chong’s work, the Artemis Generation is one step closer to exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond. He supported optical navigation operations during Artemis I, is writing software that will fly on Artemis II, and leads optical testing for Orion’s docking cameras. But his path to NASA wasn’t always written in the stars. 

“I found math difficult as a kid,” Chong admits. “I didn’t enjoy it at first, but my parents encouraged me patiently, and eventually it started to click and then became a strength and something I enjoyed. Now, it’s a core part of my career.” He emphasizes that perseverance is key, especially for students who may feel discouraged by challenging subjects. 

Most of what Chong has learned, he says, came from working collaboratively on the job. “No matter how difficult something may seem, anything can be learned,” he said. “I could not have envisioned being involved in projects like these or working alongside such great teams before coming to Johnson.” 

His career has also reinforced the importance of teamwork, especially when working with contractors, vendors, universities, and other NASA centers. “Coordinating across these dynamic teams and keeping the deliverables on track can be challenging, but it has helped to be able to lean on teammates for assistance and keep communication flowing,” said Chong.

And soon, those systems will help Artemis astronauts explore places no human has gone before. Whether guiding Orion to the Moon or beyond, Chong’s work is helping NASA write the next chapter of space exploration. 

“I thank God for the doors He has opened for me and the incredible mentors and coworkers who have helped me along the way,” he said. 

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Sumer Loggins