Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
is on two of four teams selected by NASA for future Explorer mission
feasibility studies. Of these four studies, two missions are expected
to be chosen for flight, with launches anticipated in 2007 and 2008.
The two teams supported by Ball Aerospace are the Next Generation Sky
Survey (NGSS), led by Principal Investigator Professor Edward L.
Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the
Astrobiology Explorer (ABE), led by Principal Investigator Dr. Scott
Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center.

"Winning these studies demonstrates our capabilities in developing
and maintaining significant roles in NASA astrophysics missions,"
said Dr. Harold Reitsema, Ball Aerospace director of Advanced
Programs for Space Science.

If NASA selects NGSS for flight, Ball Aerospace will provide the
spacecraft for the NGSS mission. NGSS is an infrared telescope that
will map the entire sky with a sensitivity 1,000 times greater than
that of previous missions. It will help search for the origins of
planets, stars and galaxies, and will provide an important catalog
of objects for NASA’s future Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST)
mission.

If NASA selects ABE for flight, Ball Aerospace will be responsible
for the flight system for the mission, including the cryostat,
telescope, spectrometer, spacecraft and mission operations. ABE
will be the first mission dedicated to the study of the evolution
of organic material in space. Its high-resolution infrared
spectrometer will determine the abundance, distribution and
identities of the chemical building blocks of life.

"Ball Aerospace is committed to helping NASA achieve its mission of
exploring the universe and searching for life," said Dr. William
Purcell, Ball Aerospace’s Medium-class Explorers (MIDEX) program
manager. "We do this by helping world-class scientists, like those
on the ABE and NGSS teams, develop and propose cutting-edge mission
concepts to NASA."

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. provides imaging and
communications products for commercial and government customers
worldwide and is a subsidiary of Ball Corporation (NYSE:BLL), a
Fortune 500 company which had sales of $3.7 billion in 2001.

Forward-Looking Statements:

The information in this news release may contain forward-looking
statements. Actual results or outcomes may differ materially from
those expressed or implied. Please refer to the Form 10-K filed by
Ball Corporation on March 28, 2002, for a summary of the key risk
factors that could affect actual results or outcomes. Key risk
factors may include, but are not limited to authorization, funding
and availability of government contracts, technical uncertainty,
weather, terrorist activities or war, customer demand, and U.S. and
foreign economic conditions.

Additional information is available at:

* ABE Web Site:
http://www.astrochem.org/abe.html

* NGSS Web Site:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/NGSS/

* NASA Explorer Mission Web Site:
http://fpd.gsfc.nasa.gov/410/index.html

[NOTE: Images supporting this release are available at
http://www.ball.com/aerospace/media/images/midex.html]