Ball Aerospace wins WorldView 2 contract

has been selected by

to build WorldView 2, its third satellite in a constellation of spacecraft that offer the highest-resolution imagery of Earth. WorldView 2 is the fourth remote-sensing satellite built by Ball Aerospace for Digital Globe.

Ball Aerospace will provide the Ball Commercial Platform (BCP) 5000 for WorldView 2, which is anticipated to launch in 2008. The spacecraft is said to offer increased resolution and target selection flexibility, and accommodates future optical, scientific and Synthetic Aperture Radar remote-sensing payloads.

Ball Aerospace is completing integration of the sensor for WorldView 1, scheduled to be on-orbit in mid-2007. Once launched, WorldView 1 will supply half-metre resolution commercial imagery content to DigitalGlobe customers worldwide, and will provide still-higher resolution imaging capability than the Ball Aerospace-built QuickBird satellite.

The advanced Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMGs) provided by Ball for WorldView 1 and WorldView 2, afford the satellites the flexibility and agility to capture more imagery than before. The addition of WorldView 2 provides the capability of 8-band multispectral pictures at resolutions as sharp as 1.8 metres and panchromatic at half-metre.