Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Boulder, CO, has been selected to provide the spacecraft for the Laser Altimetry Mission scheduled to be launched in a near-polar orbit in July 2001.
Total cost of the mission is set at under $200 million,
including the launch vehicle and three years of science and data
analysis. Total value of Ball Aerospace's delivery order will be
announced after the contract is finalized and awarded in early February.
The Laser Altimetry Mission, recently known as ICESAT for
Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, will accurately measure
the elevations of the Earth's ice sheets, clouds, and land and
answer fundamental questions about the growth or shrinkage of the
Earth's polar ice sheets and future global sea level rise or fall.
ICESAT also will measure the heights of clouds for studies of
Earth's temperature balance and will measure land topography for a
variety of scientific and potential commercial applications.
In addition to providing the spacecraft, Ball Aerospace will
integrate and test the primary instrument on the ICESAT satellite,
the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System. The laser altimeter is
being developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
MD, and will provide precise elevation of the land, ice, and
clouds that are overflown.
The laser is completely eye-safe to individuals on the
ground. It works by transmitting short pulses of infrared light
and visible-green light to measure ice sheet elevation and land
topography (infrared light) and measurements of clouds and
aerosols (green light). The distance from the spacecraft to
clouds and to Earth's surface will be determined from measurements
of the time taken for the laser pulses to travel to these targets
and return. Similar instrumentation has been flown on aircraft
over the Greenland ice sheet for proof-of-concept experiments.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets cover 10 percent of
the Earth's land area, and contain 77 percent of the Earth's fresh
water and 99 percent of its glacier ice. Measurements of the ice
sheets are essential for assessing whether future changes in ice
volume will add to the sea level rise, which is already occurring,
or whether the ice sheets might grow and absorb a significant part
of the predicted sea level rise.
ICESAT is one in a series of spacecraft for NASA's Earth
Science program which will study the Earth's system and the
effects of natural and human-induced changes on the global environment.
ICESAT is being developed by a partnership of NASA, industry,
and university teams. ICESAT will be placed into an orbit 379
miles above the Earth with an inclination of 94 degrees to the
equator. A launch vehicle for the ICESAT mission will be selected
from the stable of medium-light expendable launch vehicles.
ICESAT's designed lifetime is for three years of operation with a
five-year goal.
Ball Aerospace's selection was made through an innovative
procurement program developed at NASA to procure, build, and
deliver spacecraft faster and more cheaply than ever before. The
Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract will make it
possible to go from procurement to launch in less than four years.
