Ball passes one billionth milestone

The Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. free-flying atmospheric lidar aboard NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) mission, fired its one billionth laser pulse over the Ivory Coast on Sunday, Feb. 3., making it the longest lasting, most powerful on-orbit space laser.

In congratulating NASA's Langley Research Center and the Centre National d'Etudes spatiales for CALIPSO's on-orbit milestone, Vice President and General Manager for Ball's Civil and Operational Space business unit, Cary Ludtke, said, "Exceeding one billion laser pulses is a significant milestone and validates the early risk reduction investments made by NASA and Ball Aerospace."

The Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument aboard CALIPSO was developed by Ball Aerospace, its Virginia-based subcontractor, Fibertek, and NASA Langley. CALIOP is a two-wavelength polarization-sensitive lidar that provides high-resolution vertical profiles of aerosols and clouds. The CALIPSO mission is providing new insight into the role that clouds and atmospheric aerosol (airborne particles) play in regulating Earth's weather, climate, and air quality.

In 2007, the Ball Aerospace CALIPSO team received a NASA Group Achievement Award for its significant contributions to the mission. CALIPSO was launched on April 28, 2006, with the cloud profiling radar mission CloudSat. CALIPSO and CloudSat fly in formation with three other satellites in the A-train constellation to enable an even greater understanding of our climate system from the broad array of sensors on these other spacecraft.