Ball Aerospace's QuikSCAT to Fly Fifth Year

EARTH OBSERVATION

QuikSCAT To Orbit Another Year On Solo Wind Watch Duty

With the apparent loss of Midori-II, the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite, (Adeos-2) last month, the information collected by the QuikSCAT scatterometer regarding ocean-wind data is more important than ever before.

Boulder - Nov 19, 2003
Based on its consistent performance in delivering important weather data to users around the world, NASA has extended the on-orbit operations of the Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) satellite built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., for a fifth year.

Launched in 1999, the satellite completed its 20,000th orbit in early 2003. QuikSCAT has been measuring winds over approximately 90 percent of the ice-free ocean on a daily basis for four years -- two years beyond its anticipated mission. With the apparent loss of Midori-II, the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite, (Adeos-2) last month, the information collected by the QuikSCAT scatterometer regarding ocean-wind data is more important than ever before.

"QuikSCAT continues to perform exceptionally well," said Chip Barnes, QuikSCAT program manager for Ball Aerospace. "It was the first in a line of spacecraft based on the Ball Commercial Platform 2000 (BCP 2000) that we anticipate to be equally effective and reliable."

Additional Ball Aerospace-built satellite busses based on the BCP 2000 design include: Quickbird, built for DigitalGlobe and launched in 2001; CloudSat, built for JPL under NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program, scheduled to launch in 2004; the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP), under construction for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the NPOESS Integrated Program Office slated to launch in 2006; and NextView, a next-generation, commercial high-resolution imaging satellite to be built for DigitalGlobe under its contract to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

QuikSCAT was the first satellite to use NASA's Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition procurement process. Ball Aerospace provided the spacecraft bus, launch interface systems, system integration, test and launch support. Ball Aerospace also performs mission operations with the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as a subcontractor.

The QuikSCAT data is used operationally by the National Center for Environmental Prediction, a branch of the National Weather Service and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The use of the data in operational systems is the result of a cooperative effort among NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and European countries.

EARTH OBSERVATION

Over Land, Sea And Air, Users Give MERIS High Marks

Paris - Nov 18, 2003
More than 150 researchers from across Europe, Canada, the United States, China and as far away as Chile have come together to recount their many and varied uses of a single instrument -- a desk-sized camera called MERIS, hurtling through space aboard Envisat at more than seven kilometres per second.

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