Ball Aerospace

From WikiCover

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation supports critical missions of important national agencies such as the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA and other U.S. government and commercial entities. The company develops and manufactures spacecraft, advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems and RF solutions for strategic, tactical and scientific applications. Over the past fifty years, Ball Aerospace has been responsible for numerous technological and scientific firsts and acts as a technology innovator for the aerospace market.

Ball Aerospace is the prime contractor on the Standard Interface Vehicle. Announced July 16, 2007, Ball Aerospace has been awarded a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center contract to build the Operational Land Imager (OLI) for the eighth Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM).

The OLI instrument provides 15-meter panchromatic and 30m multi-spectral Earth-imaging spatial-resolution capability. OLI includes a 185km swath allowing the entire globe to be imaged every 16 days. OLI instrument delivery is slated for Sept. 2010, with launch anticipated in 2011.

The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). For more than thirty years, Landsat satellites have continuously and consistently archived images of Earth, creating a historical archive unmatched in quality, detail, coverage, and length. The multispectral imagery is gathered for applications that include agricultural monitoring, natural resource management and land-use planning.

Ball Aerospace is also competing for the Landsat spacecraft bus. The Goddard Rapid Space Development Office Landsat Spacecraft Accommodation study currently underway will result in a Ball Aerospace design that will accommodate the mission-specific requirements of the follow-on Landsat mission.