USAF contracts Ball Aerospace for risk reduction service on Weather Satellite Follow-on program

Ball Aerospace and Technologies has been chosen by the U.S Air force to provide risk reduction services on its next-gen of microwave sounding and imaging instruments for the Weather Satellite Follow-on program.

Under the terms of agreement, Ball Aerospace will examine and present the best measures to achieve the requirements of DND for measuring soil moisture and ocean surface vector winds using a microwave instrument tailor fitted for small, low-cost launch vehicles. This effort shares a heritage with the Global Precipitation Monitoring Microwave Imager (GMI) instrument, a machine that was also built by Ball Aerospace and delivered to NASA for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission.

Aside from GMI and microwave instruments, Ball Aerospace is also known for building the satellite bus and Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) instrument for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting satellite -- NOAA’s newest polar-orbiting satellite. Presently, the company is also working on the satellite bus and additional copy of OMPS for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System.

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Lockheed Martin activates first GPS III satellite

Lockheed Martin -- a leading global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company -- has successfully powered up the system module of the U.S Air Force’s next-generation Global Positioning System 3 satellites. This new development indicates that the company is on schedule to send the first satellite into orbit in 2014.

The successful turning on of the GPS III SV-1 shows the satellite’s mechanical integration, validating its interfaces and paves the way for electrical and integrated hardware-software testing. The next-generation GPS satellite will complete its Assembly, Integration and Test (AI&T) in Lockheed’s new GPS Processing Facility (GPF) specifically built for efficient and affordable satellite production.

The U.S Air Force GPS III program will affordably take over the old GPS satellites, at the same time enhancing the capability to meet the increasing demands of civilian, commercial and military users. GPS III satellites are expected to provide improved accuracy and greater anti-jamming power, all while enhancing the satellite’s design life and adding a new civil signal made to be interoperable with international global navigation satellite systems.

Lockheed Martin is under the contract of the U.S Air Force to build the first four and advanced procurement funding of long-lead components for the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth GPS III satellites. Reports said that the Air Force plans on buying up to 32 GPS III satellites.

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Multinational company Boeing brings SENSE NanoSats to Air Force

Boeing, an American aerospace and defense corporation, has given two Space Environmental NanoSat Experiment (SENSE) satellites to the U.S Air Force

These nanosats are 30 x 10 x 10 centimeters in size, and weigh less than nine pounds each. They are scheduled to be sent into orbit in the summer of 2013 on the ORS-3 mission, built to collect and transmit weather data. Each of the nanosat contains a GPS receiver and sensor so that it can gather vdata to help support assessments and weather prediction. These nanosats also have a miniature S-band transceiver to downlink mission and spacecraft data at one megabit per second.

Boeing Phantom Works Advanced Space & Intelligence Systems Director Bruce Chesley said in a statement, "The SENSE nanosats offer customers an affordable, operationally robust option to conduct military missions using spacecraft no larger than a standard loaf of bread.”