Ball Aerospace and Technologies has successfully completed the critical milestone of bonding the Schmidt Corrector optic to its mounting ring for the Kepler Mission. Ball anticipates delivery of all Kepler optics by late-June. The spacecraft integration is scheduled to begin in August 2007, while Kepler photometer integration with the spacecraft will begin in July 2008.
Ball is building both the photometer and spacecraft for the Kepler mission, and will manage system integration and testing. A Discovery mission, Kepler is NASA's first mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars.
The photometer consists of a classical Schmidt telescope with an aperture of 95 cm, a primary mirror of 1.4 meters, and an array of 42 CCDs at the focus. It features a focal plane array with more than 95 million pixels that will measure the brightness of 100,000 stars every 30 minutes. The Schmidt optic corrector plate is suspended from its mounting ring 3-meters (10 feet) above the telescope's primary mirror, and will be used to correct spherical aberration after the telescope is on-orbit. Kepler is scheduled to launch in November, 2008.
Ball Aerospace and 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 now 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 worldwide and reported 2006 sales of $6.6 billion.
