Ball’s Radarsat-1 Was On the Ball For 12 Years More Than Expected!

 

[SatNews] Canadian government’s Earth observation satellite concluded its mission after serving for more than 17 years—12 years longer than its mission life.A Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Radarsat-1 launched in 1995 for an expected 5-year mission. It was Canada’s first and oldest Earth monitoring satellite and conducted the first complete radar survey of Antarctica.

Ball Aerospace built the spacecraft bus and a portion of the ground station for the advanced operational synthetic aperture for Spar Aerospace and the Canadian Space Agency. Ball also provided technical services to Spar (MacDonald Dettwiler), including system engineering and system integration planning. Radarsat-1 represented several firsts for Ball Aerospace:

—First fixed price and commercial spacecraft bus, introducing a cost-effective solution for Earth observation and remote-sensing missions

—First Ball Aerospace international spacecraft, which expanded the company’s profile into new markets

—Inaugural satellite bus for the company’s successful Ball Configurable Platform (BCP) line of spacecraft
Source: http://satnews.com/story.php?number=2089531053

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