Ball Aerospace to Design NASA Landsat-9 Cryocooler

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has received a $18.2 million contract to design, test and deliver a cryocooler for NASA’s Landsat-9 spacecraft.

Ball Aerospace will build two stages of cooling materials into the Thermal Infrared Sensor-2 instrument Cryocooler, NASA said Tuesday.

The first cooling stage will be for a layer of thermal shielding and the second for the focal plane assembly in the cryocooler that is set for delivery on Feb. 3, 2018.

Ball Aerospace will also develop a flight model and a flight spare model of the thermo-mechanical unit, a flight model and an engineering model of the cryocooler electronics and a flight model and engineering model of the redundant switch electronics.

Landsat 9’s goal is to help detect changes on the global land surface.