Air Force Selects Ball Aerospace for Weather Satellite Follow-on Risk Reduction Contract

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[Satellite TODAY 04-15-13] The U.S. Air Force has selected Ball Aerospace & Technologies to perform risk reduction work on the next generation of microwave sounding and imaging instruments for the Weather Satellite Follow-on program.

Under a contract awarded by the Space and Missile Systems Center, Ball Aerospace will study and present the best ways to 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 Global Precipitation Monitoring Microwave Imager (GMI) instrument, which Ball Aerospace built and recently delivered to NASA for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission.

The company has built the satellite bus and the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) instrument for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, NOAA’s most recent polar-orbiting weather satellite, and is currently building the satellite bus and an additional copy of OMPS for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System. Ball Aerospace also built the Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument that was launched aboard the Landsat Data Continuity Mission on Feb. 11 and began delivering images in March.