NEO Surveyor's 20-foot Sunshade Inspected

NASA's NEO Surveyor is getting a final check on its 20-foot sunshade just before launch. The shade, built by Applied Aerospace in Stockton, stands 20 feet tall and 8 feet wide at the base. Its two panels meet at a 23.5-degree angle and are covered with 864 solar cells. That array can produce up to two kilowatts, enough to charge all the spacecraft's batteries. SolAero Technologies fitted the cells in Albuquerque in January before the shade went through thermal-vacuum tests. Those tests ran in March at a commercial facility in El Segundo, California. The completed shade arrived at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder ahead of schedule in May. Technicians inspected it again in late July 2026, confirming every component is ready. Once in orbit, the probe will hunt for hard-to-find asteroids and comets that lie near the Sun. That region is a blind spot for ground-based telescopes, making the mission uniquely valuable.