Home >> News: March 21st, 2016 >> Story
Satnews Daily
March 21st, 2016

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Selects Vanguard Space Technologies To Deliver Critical Instruments For Landsat 9


[Satnews] Vanguard Space Technologies, Inc. (Vanguard) today announced that it has been selected by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. to produce mission-critical structures for the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) instrument for the Landsat 9 project. Vanguard will be responsible for the Baseplate Structural Assembly and Mounting Struts for the OLI-2 Instrument. 


Figure 1 Landsat 9 Rendition – Courtesy NASA Goddard

The scientific objective of the Landsat Program is to provide the baseline data required to map global land cover, land use and change on an annual basis over multi-decadal periods of time.

Landsat 9 builds on the great performance of Landsat 8 and extends the 40+ year Landsat data archive. The OLI is a reflective, multi-channel, Earth-imaging instrument that provides highly calibrated imagery to detect and quantify the affect natural and human-induced activities on the Earth’s surface. 

The Baseplate Structural Assembly and Mounting Struts consist of lightweight, composite construction and will include multiple attach points and metallic fittings to mount the precision telescope and electronic components to the spacecraft. Vanguard will use advanced composite materials, manufacturing and assembly techniques to meet very exacting geometric tolerances required over the broad operational temperature range of the spacecraft. 

“We are very proud to have been selected by Ball Aerospace to be a part of this important Landsat mission and to add to our business base with this important customer,” said Mr. Frank Belknap, CEO of Vanguard. “We have a long heritage of producing extremely tight tolerance, high-precision, lightweight structures for telescope and satellite structural products. We will utilize this Vanguard Space Technologies press release  experience to meet all structural and geometric tolerance requirements to ensure a fully compliant, dimensional stable structure is delivered to Ball Aerospace meeting all OLI-2 mission requirements.”