NEO Surveyor Survey Scientist / Aerospace Engr 3

NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is a planned mission (launch: September 2027) with a goal of finding, identifying, and characterizing potentially hazardous asteroids in our Solar System. The Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences is an academic unit within the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences.
The NEO Surveyor survey scientist’s high-level responsibilities include:
• Assist the Principal Investigator and Science Team in developing the NEO Surveyor survey plan, which determines where the Observatory points as a function of time.
• Interface with the NEO Surveyor Science Data System (NSDS) archive to access NEO Surveyor image and catalog data, and work with the NSDS team to maximize the ability to link individual NEO Surveyor detections of small body candidates.
• Interface with the NEO Surveyor mission system team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Physics (LASP), and ensure that the teams at JPL and LASP produce uplink sequences that match the desired survey plan.
• Interface with the Minor Planet Center to ensure that the survey plan produces the best possible orbits for small body candidates detected by NEO Surveyor.