Ball Aerospace & Technologies

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (commonly Ball Aerospace) is a manufacturer of spacecraft, components, and instruments for national defense, civil space and commercial space applications. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ball Corp. (NYSE: BLL), with primary offices in Boulder and facilities in Broomfield and Westminster in Colorado, with smaller offices in New Mexico, Ohio, Georgia, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.

Ball Aerospace began building pointing controls for military rockets in 1956, and later won a contract to build one of NASA’s first spacecraft, the Orbiting Solar Observatory. Over the years, the company has been responsible for numerous technological and scientific projects and continues to provide aerospace technology to NASA and related industries.

Ball Aerospace also has many other products and services for the aerospace industry, including lubricants, optical systems, star trackers and antennas. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ball Corp., Ball Aerospace was cited in 2005 as the 99th largest defense contractor in the world.^[1] Both parent and subsidiary headquarters are co-located in Broomfield, Colorado.

Participating projects

Current

• The Orbital Express^[2] autonomous satellite servicing mission
• The Kepler Space Observatory^[3] satellite to search for habitable planets
• The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the formation of the earliest stars in the universe.
• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) Program, which, over a seven-month mission in a polar orbit will map the entire sky in multiple mid-far infrared wavelengths. This crucial mission may find close and cool objects to our sun never before detected. It will also act as a predecessor to the JWST Program.
• The WorldView-2 earth observation satellite.^[4]
• The Opticks^[5] remote sensing data visualization application.

Historical

• DigitalGlobe's remote sensing spacecraft: QuickBird (with Orbital Sciences Corporation), WorldView-1, and WorldView-2
• The instrumentation for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Ball Aerospace developed the Cryogenic Telescope Assembly (CTA) and two of the three science instruments: the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS).
• Instrument packages for the Hubble Telescope, including the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), all which were installed on the observatory during the Space Shuttle mission STS-125 in 2009. After the servicing mission was completed, all of Hubble's scientific instruments are of Ball Aerospace manufacture.
• AEROS^[6]
• CALIPSO, a joint NASA and CNES environmental spacecraft
• CloudSat, a NASA Earth observation spacecraft
• Deep Impact spacecraft. Ball Aerospace designed and built the spacecraft and all of its instrument packages for NASA.
• Star trackers for NASA's Space Shuttle program
• The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) HiRISE camera
• Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) conformal antennas
• High-Gain Antenna Gimbal (HGAG) and the Panoramic-camera Mast Assembly (PMA) for the Mars Exploration Rover
• Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO)
• Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Ball Aerospace developed and built the cryogenically cooled telescope, dewar and sunshade
• The Mast Mounted Sight for the OH-58D Kiowa helicopter
• SBUV/2 Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Radiometer

References

1. ^ "Defense News Top 100". Defense News Research. 2005. http://www.defensenews.com/content/features/2005chart1.html. Retrieved 2006-07-29. 
2. ^ Oribital Express
3. ^ Kepler Space Observatory
4. ^ DigitalGlobe announces Ball building WorldView 2 satellite
5. ^ Opticks
6. ^ Yenne, Bill (1985). The Encyclopedia of US Spacecraft. Exeter Books (A Bison Book), New York. ISBN 0-671-07580-2. p.12 AEROS

External links

• Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. home page