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KAHULUI, Hawaii – After years of study and unsuccessful proposals, NASA has decided to continue the development of a space telescope for the search for asteroids close to Earth.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Deputy Scientific Administrator, announced that the agency would send a mission called NEO Mission, a concept based on the NEOCam mission, finalist of the previous Discovery competition. class of planetary science missions.
A key difference for the NEO monitoring mission, however, lies in the fact that the mission will be "directed" by NASA rather than through the Discovery program or another program. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will lead the development of the mission as part of NASA's global defense program.
At a meeting of the agency's Global Science Advisory Committee in Washington, Zurbuchen said the mission was rather operational and aimed to achieve the Congress's goal of discovering at least 90 percent asteroids close to the Earth at a distance of at least 140 meters. diameter, rather than a scientific mission following the direction of decennial surveys.
"The only reason we want all 140-meter objects is not because we need them to do all the science," he said. "It's because we want to know if any of them are on the road to collision with time."
Zurbuchen said the new mission, strictly speaking, would not be a continuation of NEOCam. This mission, proposed during the previous Discovery competition, was among the finalists, but was not selected for a flight in early 2017. NASA, however, provided additional funding for Phase A to support work on infrared detectors that the mission would use to search for asteroids. .
"NEOCam was a [principal investigator]mission class that was not selected, put in an extended phase A, and then stopped, "he said. "What we have invested time in is the instrument that is moving forward on a mission that has a lot of similarities to what NEOCam was designed for."
The new mission, as described at the meeting, would fly a 50-centimeter telescope with an infrared camera operating between 4 and 10 microns. The total mass of the spacecraft would not exceed 1,300 kilograms, which would allow it to embark on a vehicle such as an Atlas 5 or a Falcon 9 until the Sun-Earth point L-1 Lagrange. Once in space, Zurbuchen said the mission should meet the 90% target set by Congress in 10 years, with an expected lifespan of 12 years.
The total cost of the NEO monitoring mission would be $ 500 to $ 600 million, with a launch no earlier than fiscal year 2025. Funding for the mission would come from the planetary defense program of the agency , currently funded at $ 150 million a year and completing the work of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission (DART) for its launch in 2021.
This approach seems to be in line with what many members of the global defense community were looking for. In recent months, they had advocated using the global defense budget to fund a series of missions, including an observatory similar to NEOCam and others to study specific objects close to the Earth.
The decision to proceed with the new mission raised questions at the meeting about what would happen to the team working on NEOCam, including lead researcher Amy Mainzer, who recently left JPL for To install at the University of Arizona. "I'm waiting for the old PI of NEOCam to have a really crucial role," Zurbuchen said, adding that he was not planning to prescribe a decision on this topic. .
"We are working on it," said Mainzer, present at the meeting.
NEOCam's senior science team will also likely participate in the new mission, "said Lindley Johnson, NASA Global Defense Coordination Office Chief. However, he said that there could be calls for the participation of additional scientists for the mission.
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