There is an old saying in engineering: What is financed is built. Therefore, the planetary community will certainly be happy that NEO Surveyor, a project the organization has greatly supported over the past few years, has gone through NASA’s rigorous budget process to reach the “development” phase with this in mind. To launch the system in 2028.

NEO Surveyor, as the name suggests, is a satellite specifically designed for the study of near-Earth objects (NEOs). One of its main contributions will be to search for asteroids and other small objects that are potentially on a collision course with Earth but cannot be seen on typical NEO survey missions due to their location in the Solar System.

Typically, their signal is just background noise versus the overwhelming signal from the sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual heat signatures of asteroids, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this new technique. Due to the increased focus on “protecting the planet,” NASA has been interested in the mission first proposed in 2005 for some time.

But like all bureaucratic systems, NASA has budget constraints, and NEO Surveyor was no exception. The agency initially canceled the NEO Surveyor budget for fiscal 2022 and 2023, forcing project scientists and engineers to switch to other projects to get paid. When NASA billed the project again, it went up to $1.2 billion, in part due to inflation in the economy in the years that followed. UT has a lot of insight into how we protect ourselves from asteroids. The first step is always to find them.

Despite the price hike, the Planetary Society expects Congress to support the mission, thanks in part to more than 5,000 people writing to their local representatives on behalf of the project. In another show of support, the seemingly irrelevant CHIPS and Science Act, passed by Congress earlier this year, forces NASA to no longer cut funding for programs, even when overspending on other programs (like JWST).

Now that funding has been secured, NASA’s mission to build and test flight hardware continues as the third part of the five-phase project cycle. At the end of this “Phase C” all hardware should be ready for final assembly and testing. But before NEO Surveyor officially goes into space and collects valuable data on our planet’s closest environment, it still has a long way to go, and possibly a fraction of its own cost. For now, however, the project appears to be on track to provide useful data, albeit a little later than its proponents had hoped.