Ball Aerospace Evaluates Air Quality Spectrometer Under NASA Program; Jim Oschmann Comments

Ball Aerospace & Technologies has finished the critical design review of an atmospheric pollution measurement tool that the company is developing for NASA under the agency’s Earth Venture Instrument program.

NASA plans to integrate the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution instrument into a commercial satellite to measure Earth’s ozone, nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde concentrations over the North American continent, Ball Aerospace said Tuesday.

Jim Oschmann, vice president and general manager of Ball Aerospace’s civil space and technology unit, said the company is working with NASA’s Langley Research Center and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to build the spectrometer.

The company started to fabricate the geostationary ultraviolet-visible sensor in June.

Ball Aerospace also partnered with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute to develop a space-based instrument for environmental monitoring.