Ball Aerospace & Technologies is a manufacturer of advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems, and spacecraft.
"The 18 shipping containers for the James Webb Space Telescope primary mirrors are shown in a Ball Aerospace clean room, August 2012. (PRNewsFoto/Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.)
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The company also offers RF solutions for scientific, tactical, and strategic applications. It specializes in offering services related to technology, aerospace, and supports critical missions undertaken by U.S. national agencies like NOAA, NASA, Department of Defense, and to other commercial and government organizations.
The company specializes in astrophysics and has played a considerable role in planetary missions like Infrared Astronomical Satellite, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, the Cosmic Background Explorer, and the Cosmic Background Explorer. The company has a vital role in the setting up of the oncoming Sentinel Mission.
Ball is vigorously involved in setting up the James Webb Telescope (JWST), the first civilian space-based observatory to study the history of Universe, right from the Big Bang theory to the formation of our Solar System and stellar systems that support the existence of life on Earth.
David L. Taylor, President and CEO of Ball Aerospace, announced the company’s success in developing JWST mirrors, a scientific mission undertaken by NASA. Ball, along with Northrop Grumman and other sub-contractors, has put eight years of laborious work in designing the JWST.
The JWST features a lightweight mirror system that is an integration of segmented mirror architecture. The Webb Telescope designed for NASA mission is to use 18 hexagonal-shaped beryllium primary mirror segments. Each of the mirror segment measures 21.3 ft or 6.5 m in height and has a width of 1.3 m. After light-weighting, each of them weighs nearly 40 kg or 88 lbs.
The construction of two of the mirror segments has been completed. They have been safely transported from Boulder to Goddard in specially designed containers that were hermetically sealed to withstand the atmospheric pressure changes that usually occur in transporting from elevated areas like Boulder to areas like Greenbelt that are as low as the sea level.
The rest of 16 mirror segments will be transported from Boulder to Goddard within the next year. By 2015, the integration of the mirror segments to establish the Webb telescope will be completed and the Webb Observatory is scheduled to function from October 2018.