NEA-Scout

NEA-Scout [NASA]

NEA-Scout (Near Earth Asteroid Scout) is a cubesat mission by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center to perform a slow flyby and rendezvous maneuver with a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) and characterize it in a way that is relevant to human exploration.

This mission is based on the JPL Deep Space NanoSat 6U cubesat Bus and features an 80 m² solar sail. The payload will consist of a COTS 4-band spectrometer.

NEA-Scout will perform several lunar fly-bys before beginning the cruise phase to the asteroid. The maximun earth distance will be about ~0.35 AU and the solar distance will be about ~0.9-1.1 AU. NEA-Scout is to perform at least one close, slow flyby (<10 m/s).

The current target for the mission is asteroid 2020 GE, which has a size of only 18 meters, but this may change depending on launch date or other factors.

NEA-Scout is one of 10 cubesats carried with the Artemis 1 (Orion CM-002) mission into a heliocentric orbit in cis-lunar space on the maiden flight of the SLS (Block 1) iCPS launch vehicle in November 2022. No signals were received after deployment.