NEO Surveying Equipment Enclosure Tested in a Historic Room for Apollo Spaceship Test

The object surveyor’s instrument enclosure near NASA was prepared for a critical environmental test in December 2024 in the Historic Room A of the Space Environment Simulation Institute, located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The 12-foot-long (3.7 meters) angle structure wrapped in a silver heat blanket exposed the spacecraft to the frigid, airless conditions experienced in deep spaces. The spongy thermoelectric testing facility is well known for testing Apollo spacecraft that moved to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

The equipment enclosure is designed to protect the infrared telescope of a spacecraft, removing heat from it during operation. After environmental testing is completed, the enclosure will return to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for further work, then dispatched to the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan, Utah, and join the telescope. Both the instrument enclosure and telescope were assembled with JPL.

NASA’s first space-based detection mission is specifically designed for planetary defense, so Neo Surveyor searches, measures and characterizes the most difficult child asteroids and comets that could pose a danger to Earth. Many near-Earth objects do not reflect much of the visible light, but they glow brightly in infrared rays due to the heating of the sun. The spacecraft’s telescope features an opening of almost 20 inches (50 cm) and features two infrared wavelength-sensitive detectors that allow near Earth objects to re-radiate solar heat.