Sunshade for NASA’s NEO Surveyor Mission Ready for Its Day in Sun

Sunshade for NASA's NEO Surveyor Mission Ready for Its Day in Sun

Development of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission continues as the spacecraft's largest component gets closer to how it will look when it launches. Recently, teams completed work on integrating solar arrays onto the spacecraft's sunshade, a structure primarily designed to block the Sun's glare. The sunshade will keep the infrared space telescope cool as it searches for near-Earth asteroids and comets while also providing the spacecraft with power.

The sunshade structure stands 20 feet (6 meters) tall and measures 8 feet (2.4 meters) wide at its base. Its two flat panels, joined at a 23.5-degree angle, were covered with 864 interconnected solar cells earlier this year. This specialized solar array can produce up to 2 kilowatts of power and will generate all the required electricity to charge the onboard batteries that power the spacecraft's systems.

When in space, NEO Surveyor will detect some of the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets, some of which may be located in the direction of the Sun - a region of sky where ground-based optical telescopes have a harder time searching. The sunshade's design is key for blocking the glare of sunlight from entering the telescope's 20-inch-wide (50-centimeter-wide) aperture as it searches for the infrared emissions coming from the surface of asteroids and comets that are heated by sunlight. By determining their location and motion through space, the mission's data will help NASA better understand the number and nature of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.

The telescope's pair of infrared detector arrays is tuned to generate detailed images of asteroids and comets within two infrared bands. Each array creates a 16-megapixel mosaic of the sky. Imaging the same part of the sky over the two infrared bands enables the NEO Surveyor science team to determine an asteroid or comet's temperature, yielding an estimate of the object's size - key information for assessing near-Earth objects.

Built by Applied Aerospace in Stockton, California, the sunshade structure was outfitted with its solar cells by SolAero Technologies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in January. Environmental testing of the sunshade and solar array was completed at a commercial thermal vacuum testing facility in El Segundo, California, in March and it was delivered to BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, ahead of schedule in May. Since then, coarse Sun sensors for attitude determination and temperature sensors have been integrated onto the sunshade, and the team completed the functional and performance testing of the solar array.

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