Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has received delivery of the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) for integration into the last of the Great Observatories. IRAC is among three instruments that will be aboard the Space Infrared Telescope Assembly (SIRTF) when it launches in 2002.
Ball Aerospace will perform cryogenic telescope assembly (CTA) integration and testing prior to delivering the CTA to Lockheed Martin Space Systems, where it will be integrated with the spacecraft to form the observatory.
IRAC is one of three instruments that will share light collected by SIRTF’s primary mirror and provide images at near infrared wavelengths. Ball Aerospace designed and built the other two SIRTF instruments that will also be housed in the CTA: the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) that will provide coverage at longer wavelengths, and the Infrared Spectrometer (IRS) that will provide spectra of astronomical objects at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.
The concept for SIRTF originated more than 20 years ago to develop and launch a series of space-based telescopes that would cover a wide range of wavelengths, making discoveries that ground-based telescopes cannot. SIRTF will gather infrared signals from the universe a distance over 10 times further than previously accomplished.
Ball Aerospace has participated in all four of the Great Observatories; the other three are the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies
