THE NASA (United States Space Agency) is building a space telescope from infrared to hunt for asteroids that could pose a danger to our planet .
NEO Surveyor is scheduled to launch in late 2027 and will reside in a region between Earth and the Sun. Its goal is to find hard-to-find objects like dark asteroids and comets, which don’t reflect much visible light.
The tool is being built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, United States. It is the agency’s first space telescope designed specifically for planetary defense.
“Our goal is to build a spacecraft that can find, track and characterize the objects most likely to hit Earth. In the process, we will learn a lot about their origins and evolution,” said Amy Mainzer, research director for NEO Surveyor and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
To track objects near Earth as they approach, the telescope uses technology that can detect two bands of infrared light — which are invisible to the human eye. These bodies, no matter how dark they are, emit this type of radiation, enabling the Surveyor to identify them.
About the size of a washer and dryer set, the tool will also be able to measure these objects, which is difficult for other instruments already in orbit. NASA has made available a live which shows the construction of the telescope 24 hours a day.
The mission to build NEO is part of a goal set by the United States Congress to discover and characterize at least 90 percent of near-Earth objects that could cause harm to the planet.
This content was originally published in Meet NASA’s new asteroid-hunting telescope on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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