NASA has tapped Boulder-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center to investigate how they might contribute to development of a key component of the agency’s new telescope.
Ball Aerospace and the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Advanced Technology Center will conduct concept studies related to the wide field opto-mechanical assembly of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST.
WFIRST is the next-generation observatory that follows the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2018.
Financial terms of the four-month study were not immediately disclosed, said Roz Brown, a Ball Aerospace spokeswoman.
Ball officials, in a statement released Thursday, said their work will draw on the company’ previous work on optical systems for
James Webb, Hubble and the Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager.
“Ball brings extensive experience to the project with relevant astrophysics missions from conception through on-orbit operations,” Jim Oschmann, vice president and general manager for Ball’s Civil Space business unit, said in a statement.
WFIRST, which has a projected launch date in the mid-2020s, is expected to have a field of view 100 times greater than Hubble’s, NASA officials have said.
“The two companies will produce different designs that meet the same goals, and so help us to explore the options for optimizing that instrument,” NASA spokeswoman Felicia Chou said in an e-mailed statement. “NASA has already produced an in-house design. These options inform an overall acquisition strategy, wherein we decide the ‘who’ for all the portions of WFIRST.”
Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or @aliciawallace