NEO Surveyor
NEO Surveyor, formerly called Near-Earth Object Camera, then NEO Surveillance Mission, is a planned space-based infrared telescope designed to survey the Solar System for potentially hazardous asteroids. The NEO Surveyor spacecraft will survey from the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange point, allowing it to look close to the Sun and see objects inside Earth's orbit. The mission will be a successor to the NEOWISE mission; the principal investigator is also NEOWISE's principal investigator, Amy Mainzer at the University of Arizona. Since first proposed in 2006, the concept unsuccessfully competed repeatedly for NASA funding against science missions unrelated to planetary defense, despite a 2005 US Congressional directive to NASA. In 2019, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office decided to implement this mission due to its national security implications. On 11 June 2021, NASA authorized the NEO Surveyor mission to proceed to the preliminary design phase.
