Marching Toward Launch of the Near-Earth Object Surveyor with Dr. Amy Mainzer

Join Dr. Amy Mainzer at the Adventurers’ Club for an inside look at NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, an ambitious effort to discover and track asteroids and comets near Earth. She will discuss the science behind the mission and how NEO Surveyor will search for potentially hazardous objects that may pose a risk to our planet.

Scheduled to launch no later than late 2027, the NEO Surveyor is designed to find, track, and characterize the majority of hazardous asteroids and comets large enough to cause severe regional devastation should they impact, as well as large numbers of objects capable of causing city-wide destruction. The observatory will survey the sky continuously throughout its five-year baseline mission from its vantage point at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point in two infrared wavelengths, 4-5.2 um and 6-10 m, at which NEOs are particularly bright. NEO Surveyor will focus on searching the near-Sun regions of the sky to maximize sensitivity to objects with the greatest potential for Earth impact.

By carrying out a repeating survey pattern optimized for NEO discovery, the observatory is estimated to discover ~100,000 to 300,000 new objects (some as small as ~10 m) and thousands of comets. These discoveries will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the orbital and size frequency distribution of the NEO population, and also provide insights into the probability of an Earth impact during the next 100 years.

All components of the NEO Surveyor mission are currently undergoing construction and testing in preparation for launch.

Dr. Amy Mainzer is a professor of planetary science at UCLA. Her research interests include asteroids and comets; instrumentation for remote sensing; and applications of remote sensing for monitoring invasive species on Earth. She is leading NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, which will carry out a comprehensive survey of asteroids and comets using a dedicated space telescope scheduled for launch no earlier than late 2027. She was also the principal investigator of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, an Earth-orbiting space telescope that searched for Earth-approaching asteroids and comets from 2009-2024. Dr. Mainzer  received a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University, an M.S. in Astronomy from California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has received numerous group achievement awards for Spitzer, WISE, NEOWISE, as well as the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, and served as the science consultant and host for the PBS Kids series Ready Jet Go! and science advisor for the 2021 Netflix film Don’t Look Up.

This program was organized by Scott Nowak #1261.