WorldView-3 spacecraft to enhance Longmont firm's high-resolution imagery capabilities

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has completed assembly of its WorldView-3, the fourth remote-sensing satellite it has built for DigitalGlobe, scheduled to launch this summer from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The WorldView-3 spacecraft is billed by Ball Aerospace as the first multi-payload, super-spectral high resolution commercial satellite for Earth observations and "advanced geospatial solutions."

Ball, in addition to the satellite bus, will provide an atmospheric instrument that it calls CAVIS - Cloud, Aerosol, Water Vapor, Ice, Snow.

CAVIS, integrated with the spacecraft, will monitor the atmosphere and provide correction data to enhance WorldView-3's imagery when it documents Earth features through dust, haze or other things that might impair visibility.

DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont but moving to Westminster next year, claims to own and operate one of the most agile and sophisticated collections of high-resolution commercial Earth imaging satellites in the world, capable of collecting more than 1 billion square kilometers of high-quality imagery every year.

WorldView-3 is described by Ball Aerospace as building on WorldView-2 and WorldView-1 technology by enhancing the satellite's control moment gyroscopes, which reorient a satellite over a targeted area in 4-to-5 seconds, compared to the 30-to-45 seconds required for traditional reaction wheels.

WorldView-3 utilizes the Ball Configurable Platform BCP 5000 spacecraft, which is designed to handle the next-generation optical and synthetic aperture radar remote sensing payloads, and is currently meeting or exceeding all its performance specifications on the WorldView-2 satellite.

Companies 'have grown up together'

For Jeff Dierks, Ball Aerospace program manager for WorldView-3 and its predecessor, WorldView-2, the next step in its partnership with DigitalGlobe only further cements what has been a rich relationship since the early 1990s.

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Ball Aerospace satellite readied for launch by DigitalGlobe