Sharjah24 – Reuters: NASA reports that it has greenlighted a plan to finish and launch its Near Earth Object Surveyor mission by the year 2026.

The N.E.O. Surveyor will be a 6-meter-long space telescope that will use infrared imaging to boost the chances astronomers have of finding large objects that might hit Earth.

Every night, astronomers across the globe use ground-based, optical telescopes to find new near-Earth objects, or N.E.O.s, and determine whether they pose a threat to Earth or not.

But these ground-based optical telescopes are only able to look for N.E.O.s in the night sky.

Currently, there are no known NEO impact threats to Earth for the next century.

However, unknown N.E.O.s can lead to unpredicted impacts, like the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013, which went undetected because it came from the direction of the sun.

The NEO Surveyor will use infrared sensors that can help astronomers find objects approaching Earth during the day from the direction of the sun — something that can't be done from ground-based observatories.