Blue Origin teams up with NASA to prevent asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth.
Jeff Bezos’ company has partnered with scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to study how to integrate Earth defense capabilities into its existing Blue Ring spacecraft platform. The concept is called the Near Earth Objects (NEO) Hunter mission, and it relies on multiple technologies to scan, deflect and divert incoming asteroids away from possible impacts with the earth.
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NEO Hunter will use several techniques to intercept, assess and, if necessary, redirect the trajectories of potentially dangerous asteroids, according to a March 11 Blue Origin. post on X.
Across two separate mission phases, NEO Hunter will release a group of cubesats to encounter and characterize a potential threat of space objects. Understanding as much as possible about an object’s composition, mass and density can inform which strategies can best be used to ensure a changed orbit.
One of these strategies can be carried out using the NEO Hunter’s powerful ion beam transmitter. The spacecraft will be able to fire a beam of charged particles at an asteroid to change its orbit. Ion drift engines expel charged particles to propel a spacecraft, such as that used at NASA DARTS probe. Similarly, an ion beam can direct a concentrated current of charge atoms with enough force to theoretically change the direction of an object in room.
If an asteroid is too large, or moving too fast, to be effectively affected by NEO Hunter’s ion beam, the spacecraft may enter a second mission phase called “Robust Kinetic Disruption.”
That technique was first demonstrated by DART, a space probe that NASA slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. DART effectively changed Dimorphos’ path around its binary partner asteroid Didymosand also changed the trajectory of the binary pair about the sun.
Likewise, NEO Hunter can set course for a high-speed interception with its target asteroid to crash into the space mountain as fast as 22,600 mph (36,370 km/h). Before doing so, however, NEO Hunter will drop another smaller satellite called “Slamcam” to document the impact and confirm the mission’s success.
“This is yet another example of how commercial platforms like Blue Ring can drive low-cost, high-priority science, exploration and planetary defense mission,” Blue Origin said in the post.
The company has designed the Blue Ring for many uses, including its use as a Mars telecommunications orbit. The satellite bus landed its first customer last year, then Blue origin collaborated with Scout place to fly an orbital domain awareness sensor as Blue Ring’s first payload.
In collaboration with JPL/Caltech, we have developed a Near-Earth Objects (NEO) Hunter mission concept for planetary defense using the Blue Ring. NEO Hunter tests multiple asteroid deflection techniques, including ion beam deflection and robust direct kinetic impact, helping protect Earth… pic.twitter.com/ZWsdfJAtLqMarch 11, 2026
Planetary defense against near-Earth objects is receiving increasing attention these days, with interest in events such as the recent crash of a meteorite through someone’s roof in Germany and the occasional near miss of one asteroid that flies between the Earth and the Moon. Astronomers have been on the case for decades, but have built a catalog of asteroids that are large enough to be dangerous and that also have a chance of hitting Earth at some point in the future. So far, they have found no serious imminent threats.
