NASA’s Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape

Engineers attach the aluminum telescope for NASA’s NEO Surveyor to the flight base frame at Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, in September 2025. The telescope is connected via a system of struts that prevents heat from passing from the spacecraft to the instrument.

Space Dynamics Laboratory/Allison Bills

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA’s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is undergoing integration and testing. With launch set for no earlier than September 2027, teams across the United States are hard at work building the spacecraft’s components, planning the kind of survey and science it will do, and developing the software to process the huge quantity of data the mission will generate.

In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with discovering potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs, but many of these objects are difficult to find with ground-based surveys. Some are as dark as charcoal, others are tiny, and many lurk in the glare of the Sun, where ground-based optical telescopes can’t see. To mitigate this, NEO Surveyor is being custom-built to scan the solar system to detect objects that will glow in the infrared as they are heated by the Sun — as opposed to the optical light they reflect, which is what ground-based surveys measure — to provide enough advance warning for humanity to do something about them, if necessary.

The spacecraft will travel about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the Sun to a region of gravitational stability called the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (or L1 point), continuously scanning large swaths of the sky for at least five years in search of NEOs that have yet to be found.

The bus structure of NASA’s NEO Surveyor, shown here, underwent a round of testing at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2025. The bus houses the power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems, all isolated from the telescope and sensitive detectors.

BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems

“NEO Surveyor is a one-of-a-kind mission designed to solve a specific challenge: finding asteroids and comets that pose the greatest risk to Earth,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Our focus is on deploying a robust observatory to the Sun-Earth L1 point, where it will conduct a continuous, multi-year infrared survey. By identifying objects that ground telescopes can miss, this mission will provide the critical data we need to safeguard our planet for years to come.”

Modular approach

Having been assembled at JPL, both the spacecraft’s infrared telescope and its instrument enclosure are undergoing integration and testing at Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) in Logan. An angular structure measuring 12 feet (3.7 meters) long, the instrument enclosure protects the spacecraft’s telescope and removes heat that could otherwise affect the heat-sensitive infrared observations.  Project engineers plan to carry out focus tests in a chamber at SDL that simulates the extreme environment of deep space to ensure the instrument works as designed and the camera remains in focus at very cold temperatures and in zero gravity.

The camera is composed of two detector arrays, tuned to generate detailed images of asteroids and comets within two infrared bands. Each array creates a 16-megapixel mosaic of the sky. Imaging the same part of the sky over the two infrared bands enables the instrument to measure an asteroid or comet’s temperature, yielding an estimate of the object’s size.

The spacecraft will also sport a 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) sunshade that allows it to look close to the Sun by blocking glare from entering the telescope’s aperture. By far the largest feature of NEO Surveyor, the structure also has solar panels on its Sun-facing surface to generate the electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems.

At BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, the sunshade is currently undergoing tests with the spacecraft’s bus, which houses power, propulsion, avionics, and communication subsystems. The integrated telescope and enclosure will from SDL to travel to BAE Systems, where they will complete the spacecraft.

Science, data, survey strategy

Meanwhile, the mission’s science team is busy planning ways to harness the full capabilities of this cutting-edge spacecraft. 

“We have a multi-institutional team, from seasoned scientists to undergraduate students, with a broad expertise in infrared mission design,” said Amy Mainzer, the mission’s lead at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “We are currently working to develop the most efficient survey strategy that the mission will use to detect some of the hardest-to-find asteroids in our solar system, plus any comets that may be headed our way.”

When the mission’s data comes to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network, it will go to the NEO Surveyor Survey Data Center at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California. Responsible for processing and calibrating the huge number of observations that the spacecraft delivers, the center will also produce images and source catalogs for archiving at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.

After identifying the moving objects in the data, IPAC will report them to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the international clearinghouse for all position measurements of minor bodies in our solar system and responsible entity for designating new discoveries. This data can then be used by planetary defense groups, including JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which calculates the orbits for all known asteroids and comets while also predicting the impact risk for hazardous objects many years into the future. The Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA will plan the survey and deliver measurements of the asteroid and comet sizes and other physical properties to public archives every six months. 

Source: NASA’s Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape - NASA Science    

Slow-dividing breast cancer cells may explain relapses decades after treatment - medicalxpress

A microscopic view of a slow-growing breast cancer tumor that has shrunk in response to standard hormone therapy and a new experimental Rac1 inhibitor. Credit: Caldon Lab, Garvan Institute

A new study by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has uncovered a hidden mechanism explaining why breast cancer can return many years after successful treatment. Published in Nature Communications, the research reveals rogue cells that change their programming to allow them to divide at a remarkably slow pace, meaning they could form microscopic tumors that silently tick away in distant organs, evading detection for decades.

This research addresses a major challenge for patients with estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where the possibility of relapse can linger for years after being declared cancer-free. Even after five to 10 years of initial hormone therapy, up to 30% of patients develop incurable relapse, heavily contributing to the more than 3,300 women who die from breast cancer in Australia every year.

Relapse is known to be caused by cancer cells lying dormant in the bone or other organs before "waking up" to cause metastasis. The new research provides evidence on a parallel pathway by which stealthy cancer cells develop into secondary tumors—findings which could uncover new approaches to prevent metastasis.

"We have become very good at treating primary breast cancer, but late relapses remain a major challenge," says Associate Professor Liz Caldon, Lab Head at the Garvan Institute and senior author of the study.

"While we know some cancer cells can go into a state of complete hibernation, we characterized an important alternative pathway that enables cells to never truly stop dividing during treatment. Instead, they survive by growing extremely slowly in the background, until a tiny speck becomes a pebble."

Even though these cancer cells are slow-growing, they are far from harmless. Once these "micrometastases"—tiny secondary tumors—cross the threshold of detection or disrupt a vital organ like the brain or bone, they can become a life-threatening relapse that is notoriously resistant to chemotherapy.

"For a long time, the idea that extremely slow-growing cells could drive relapse was just a theory. We've found evidence for the way this could happen in ER-positive breast cancer. By identifying the pathways that are important in these slow-growing cells we have a new lever to potentially prevent these deadly outcomes," Associate Professor Caldon says.

Escaping therapy by slowing down

While standard hormone treatments are highly effective at clearing out the vast majority of active breast cancer cells, a tumor is not uniform. The researchers found that some cancer cells naturally divide at a very slow rate when treated with therapy, and the slow rate inadvertently protects them from treatment.

As the treatment successfully neutralizes the fast-growing cancer cells, these slow-growing survivors are left behind to cause cancer relapse down the track.

To understand this process, the team spent years isolating and cultivating exceptionally slow-growing breast cancer cells in the laboratory. When they introduced these cells into preclinical models, they discovered that a slow growth rate did not limit the cancer's ability to spread throughout the body.

"It took years to isolate these specific cells because they were dividing so slowly, almost in defiance of how we typically expect cancer to behave. But once we observed them in action, we realized that a slow clock doesn't mean a stopped clock," says Kristine Fernandez, Senior Research Assistant in the Caldon Lab and first author of the study.

"These cells were migrating to organs like the bone and lungs, proving that speed isn't everything when it comes to metastasis."

A new target for treatment

The researchers then pinpointed what drives these slow-growing cells—a cellular communication channel known as the Rac1 pathway. Rac1 is critical for cell movement, structure, and survival. By using advanced biosensor imaging, the team visualized the Rac1 pathway activating inside live, slow-growing cancer cells.

Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that blocking this pathway could effectively shrink the cancer. Using experimental Rac1 inhibitors, the team successfully reduced the overall size and number of tumors present in patient-derived lab models of breast cancer.

Looking ahead, the Caldon Lab is launching new investigations to determine if Rac1 inhibitors could be used preventatively to stop the cancer coming back.

"If we can understand the specific biology of these slow-growing cells, we might eventually be able to offer better ways to track whether a decade of hormone therapy is actually working and ultimately prevent recurrence for patients living with the threat of relapse," says Associate Professor Caldon. 

Provided by Garvan Institute of Medical Research  

by Garvan Institute of Medical Research

edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Slow-dividing breast cancer cells may explain relapses decades after treatment