NEO Surveyor’s Sunshade Gets Inspected

JPEG (1.17 MB)

The large sunshade of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is mounted on an assembly ring during inspections in a clean room at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in July 2026.

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 and then tested before arriving in Colorado. 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.

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 ahead of schedule in May.

When in space, NEO Surveyor will seek out 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.

More information about NEO Surveyor is available at:

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

Full text from nasa.gov (public domain).