Under terms of the agreement signed in early January, TRW will serve as the team's prime contractor while Ball Aerospace will be the principal subcontractor. Ball Aerospace will play a major role in developing the NGST payload, with special emphasis on the optical elements and the program's science objectives.

Until now, TRW and Ball Aerospace have been working under separate, competing NGST architecture study contracts with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

"TRW and Ball Aerospace have each played significant roles in all four of NASA's Great Observatories," said Joanne Maguire, vice president and general manager of TRW's Space & Laser Programs Division.

"By combining TRW's systems capabilities, demonstrated as prime contractor for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, with Ball Aerospace's experience developing payloads for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Space Infrared Telescope, we have defined for NASA the team best suited to achieve the goals of the NGST science community," Maguire added.

"This is a very complementary team," said Jerry Chodil, vice president of Ball Aerospace's Civil Space Systems organization. "Our arrangement will leverage Ball Aerospace's expertise in science payloads and optical systems with TRW's strength in precision deployable space structures."

The TRW/Ball Aerospace team plans to compete for the next phase of the NGST program, a Phase-A architecture study. Requests for proposals for that procurement are expected during the first quarter of 1999.

Ball Aerospace is currently a key member of the TRW-led team producing the Chandra X-ray Observatory for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. Chandra, formerly known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is scheduled for delivery to Kennedy Space Center, Fla., later this month. Launch aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia is expected in spring 1999.

NGST, part of NASA's Origins program, is scheduled for launch in 2007. Operating in the far visible to mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, it is expected to have about 10 times the light-gathering capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope.

As part of a separate contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., TRW is an industry partner in the development of the spacecraft for another Origins program, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM).

NASA's Origins program is a series of linked science missions directed at answering fundamental questions about the origin of galaxies, stars, and planets, and the possibility of habitable, Earth-like worlds around nearby stars. In addition to NGST and SIM, it includes JPL's Deep Space-3 (DS-3) mission, which will demonstrate the capability for long baseline interferometry using formation-flying spacecraft.

Technology from all three missions will enable two additional Origins missions, Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and Terrestrial Planet Imager, which will detect and image terrestrial-sized planets around nearby stars.