Ball Aerospace Awarded US Air Force Risk Reduction Contract

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has been selected by the U.S. Air Force to perform risk reduction work on the next generation of microwave sounding and imaging instruments for the Weather Satellite Follow-on program. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130108/LA39163LOGO) Under a contract awarded by the Space and Missile Systems Center, El Segundo, California, Ball Aerospace will investigate how to best achieve Department of Defense requirements for measuring soil moisture and ocean surface vector winds with a microwave instrument designed to fit into smaller, lower-cost launch vehicles. This effort shares a heritage with the state-of-the-art Global Precipitation Monitoring Microwave Imager (GMI) instrument, which Ball Aerospace built and recently delivered to NASA for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission. "This risk reduction effort will help the Air Force develop an affordable system for space-based environmental sensing," said Tim Harris, vice president and general manager of Ball Aerospace's National Defense business unit. "Ball's experience with other similar systems lays the foundation to address the nation's highest priority defense weather requirements." Ball Aerospace has a long history of designing and manufacturing cost effective remote sensing systems for defense, civil and commercial applications. Ball built the satellite bus and the Ozone Mapping and See full press release