Ball Aerospace's
QuikSCAT Celebrates Eighth On-Orbit Anniversary
(19 June 2007) The Quick Scatterometer
(QuikSCAT) satellite built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. completed
eight years of outstanding on-orbit operations today, performing six years
beyond its minimum two-year mission requirement.
QuikSCAT
continues to return critical wind data to forecast hurricanes and El Nino
effects and pinpoint typhoons and other marine storms, as well as help
scientists measure the mass of the Antarctic and Greenland ice
sheets.
QuikSCAT data has improved the warning time for tropical cyclone
development in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific hurricane basins. Using wind
field data from QuikSCAT, researchers are able to detect potential cyclones in
these regions earlier than traditional capabilities allowed. This early
detection of storms could allow residents more time to prepare for adverse
weather conditions.
"QuikSCAT has clearly demonstrated its reliability
to both government and commercial customers, providing quality forecasting data
to scientists and meteorologists - the type of data that could easily be
extended with a new scatterometer mission," said David L. Taylor, president and
CEO of Ball Aerospace.
QuikSCAT is a polar orbiting satellite with an
1800 km wide measurement swath on the earth's surface, circling the earth from
a distance of 800 km (500 miles). Generally, this results in 400,000
measurements daily over a given geographic region. The onboard SeaWinds
scatterometer has enhanced global climate research by recording sea-surface
winds over the oceans on a 25 km x 25 km spatial scale.
NASA awarded its
first Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition fixed-price contract to Ball Aerospace for
the QuikSCAT, which was completed in 11 months - an industry record for a
spacecraft of its size. The QuikSCAT Ball Commercial Platform (BCP 2000)
architecture has since been used for the Ball Aerospace-built QuickBird I and
II satellites, the ICESat and CloudSat satellites, and the National
Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory
Project.
Designed to measure ocean winds, SeaWinds has proven useful in
many other applications. Earlier this year, it detected the most widespread
Antarctic melting ever observed using satellites during the past three decades.
In 1999, it detected a mammoth, previously lost iceberg called B10A in the
Drake Passage shipping lane. The iceberg is now tracked for the National Ice
Center to route supply ships into and out of Antarctica's McMurdo
station.
QuikSCAT was built for the Goddard Space Flight Center and the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The scatterometer sensor was built by JPL. The
satellite is operated through a subcontract with the University of
Colorado/Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Ball Aerospace
& Technologies Corp. 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 50 years, Ball Aerospace has been responsible for numerous
technological and scientific 'firsts' and acts as a technology innovator for
the aerospace market.
Ball Corporation is a supplier of high-quality
metal and plastic packaging products for beverage, food and household
customers, and of aerospace and other technologies and services, primarily for
the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ more than
15,500 people world-wide and reported 2006 sales of US$ 6.6
billion.
(source: Ball Aerospace and Technologies)