Overview

Ball Aerospace’s Global Precipitation Measurement-Microwave Imager (GMI) will play an essential role in the Earth’s weather and environmental forecasting.

The GMI supports the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, which is a joint effort between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to improve climate, weather and hydrological predictions by providing more accurate precipitation measurements from space.

Our Role

Ball Aerospace’s role in the GPM program includes the design, development and fabrication of the GMI. The GMI is central to the success of the GPM and allows for temporal sampling of rainfall accumulations as well as more frequent and higher quality data collection. With less than two percent of the Earth’s total water volume being potable, the scientific community has long been committed to acquiring precipitation information.

The GPM mission will fly multiple spacecraft. The core spacecraft will fly in a 65º inclination low earth orbit, and will carry the GMI and a dual frequency radar. The second spacecraft will fly in a polar orbit, carrying a second copy of the GMI. This combination of instruments provides global measurement of precipitation, with rapid revisit of mid-latitude measurements.

Roughly eight feet tall, the GMI instrument is a powerhouse of radiometry. Rotating at 32 revolutions per minute, it will use two very stable calibration points on each revolution to calibrate the data it has scanned.

The ingenuity of Ball Aerospace’s engineers to achieve consistent, steady calibration, enabled GMI to become known as the instrument that is setting the new standard of calibration for the scientific community.