When:

Monday, August 8, 2011 – 10:30-11:30 a.m. (MDT)

Where:  

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

1600 Commerce Street

Boulder, CO Ball Aerospace

Call-in #:

1-888-669-2803

Access Code: 5021430

Subject:

Ball Aerospace has completed final compatibility testing for NPP – NASA's newest climate satellite – and the five scientific instruments that will fly aboard the satellite when it launches from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, slated for October 25.  Under contract to Goddard Space Flight Center, Ball Aerospace designed and built the NPP satellite bus and one of the satellite's five advanced-technology instruments, and integrated all the instruments.

NASA's National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) is the nation's next generation operational climate and weather mission. All of NPP's data products have some bearing on understanding global change and climate science and will also help meteorologists improve weather forecasts. The remote-sensing instruments aboard NPP will measure the Earth's atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, humidity sounding, land and ocean biological activity and cloud and aerosol properties, already in development at Ball Aerospace. The NPP mission will help link the current generation of NASA Earth-observing satellites called the Earth Observing System (EOS) to a next-generation of polar-orbiting environmental satellites called the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), managed by NOAA. NPP data will also be used as input to numerical weather models until the JPSS system is deployed.

Participants Include:

David L.Taylor, President & CEO, Ball Aerospace  

Andrew Carson, Program Executive, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA  

Jack Hayes, Director, National Weather Service, NOAA

Waleed Abdalati, Chief Scientist, NASA

Mary Kicza, Assistant Administrator for Satellite and Information, NOAA  

Instrument & Ground Providers: Ball Aerospace, ITT, Northrop Grumman and the Raytheon Company

Additional information about NPP can be found at:

http://www.ball.com/aerospace/programs/suomi-npp

http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Contact:

Roz Brown

Media Relations Manager

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

303-533-6059 or 720-581-3135

rbrown@ball.com

**A clean room tour will follow to allow reporters and photographers a close-up encounter with the spacecraft.