According to a NASA press release, construction has now officially begun on its next-generation asteroid hunting platform called NEOWISE.
NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor , a space observatory built to look for the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that wander into Earth's orbital neighborhood, recently passed a rigorous technical and programmatic evaluation,
NEO Surveyor, operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, will travel a million miles to the L1 Lagrange point, an area of gravitational stability between Earth and the Sun, where it will orbit for its five-year primary mission. “For the first time in our planet’s history, Earth’s inhabitants are developing methods to protect Earth by deflecting hazardous asteroids,” said Amy Mainzer, the mission’s survey director at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But before we can deflect them, we first need to find them. NEO Surveyor will be a game-changer in that effort.”
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