Technicians at Ball Aerospace do a fit check on the optical bonding fixture.

Overview
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center chose Ball Aerospace to build the Operational Land Imager (OLI) for the eighth Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM).

The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. For more than 30 years, the LDCM has gathered multispectral imagery that has provided continuous land surface observations. Scientists use the data to monitor changes in global land cover; manage the Earth’s natural resources; make decisions about land-use planning; and understand ecosystem dynamics.

OLI in Ball Aerospace's Stray Light Test Facility.

Our Role
Ball Aerospace is designing and building the instrument, which provides 15-meter (49-foot) panchromatic and 30-meter multi-spectral Earth-imaging spatial-resolution capability. OLI includes a 185 km swath allowing the entire planet to be imaged every 16 days.

To help continue NASA’s longest continuous imagery data record of our planet, Ball Aerospace is leveraging its experience with detectors to produce the focal plane subsystem.

OLI has an array of 14 state-of-the-art detectors and operates in a pushbroom
fashion – taking images as it looks at a spot on the Earth’s surface and continues moving forward, unlike telescopes that scan back and forth. The company’s strong expertise in detectors is partly attributed to decades of work on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

A master machinist inspects the
optical bench.

In addition to leveraging its detector experience, Ball Aerospace has a strong legacy in both Earth science and remote sensing missions, including WorldView-1 and WorldView-2, Radarsat, QuikSCAT and QuickBird.

Ball Aerospace provides unsurpassed value in the design, development, test, and calibration of high-performance imaging systems for both commercial and government missions.

The OLI is slated to launch in late 2012 and is expected to be on orbit for at least five years.