Boulder, Colo.-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. said Feb. 9 it had completed stray light testing of the Operational Land Imager telescope assembly it is building for NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM).
The testing was conducted at Ball’s new Stray Light Test Facility, a Class 5 clean room designed to eliminate undesired sources of background light.
The Operational Land Imager is designed to provide 15-meter panchromatic and 30-meter multispectral images of the Earth’s land masses.
LDCM is slated to launch in late 2012 to continue the collection of moderate-resolution land imagery the United States has been collecting since the first Landsat satellite launched in the early 1970s.
NASA is overseeing development of LDCM on behalf of the U.S. Geological Survey, which will take over spacecraft flight operations once the satellite is safely on orbit.
