BOULDER, USA, Oct. 28, 2026 - NASA has published new details on two future observatories. The first is NEO Surveyor: once in space, it will search for hard-to-find near-Earth asteroids and comets, including objects in the direction of the Sun.^[1][2] A technician inspected its sunshade at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in late July 2026.^[3] The second is the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), intended to replace the James Webb Space Telescope as NASA's primary observatory^[4] and scheduled to launch in the 2040s.^[5] A NASA systems engineering study published in June 2026 in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems^[6] compared three telescope designs and favoured off-axis layouts for better light gathering.^[7] Impact Insight. Asteroids approaching from the Sun's direction are hard to spot from the ground, because telescopes cannot look close to the Sun at night. An infrared telescope in space sees asteroids by their warmth against cold space, which is why NEO Surveyor matters most to planetary defense: it is designed to find many of the near-Earth objects large enough to devastate a region, years before any could arrive.