Boston, MA 05/20/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Ball Corporation (NYSE:BLL), which is an innovative and sustainable metal packaging supplier to food, beverage, personal care and household product industries, reports that it has earned a contract from NASA. Under the contract, the company has been given the task to construct a “High-spectral-Resolution-Lider for Aerosols Winds and Clouds through employing Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar (HAWC-OAWL)”.
Aid NASA Scientists
The main idea for building the Lidar is to help NASA scientists get a better understanding of how the aerosols and water vapor, affect the quality of air and cloud formation while wind transport. Currently, the OAWL technology being employed has returned successful results for NASA financed test flights. Ball Corporation has received the contract for a span of three years and is valued at $4.3 million. The contract will let Ball Aerospace to engage OAWL in order to measure aerosol properties profile along with wind speed and direction profiles and to establish performance with further midair flight testing.
Reconfigure
HAWC-OAWL is among the 17 technology proposals that was chosen under NASA’s Instrument Incubator Program for future progression so as to enable Earth observation measurements and at the same time, cutting down the risk, size, cost, mass, volume and development time. The OAWL system was determined and validated for the first time in comparison to a NOAA wind lidar back in 2011. Ball Corporation (NYSE:BLL) will therefore now reshape the prevailing OAWL technology to include a second laser wavelength, which will allow HAWC-OAWL to point in two directions in chorus. In addition to this, the system will be able to distinguish airborne particles while measuring wind profiles to supply information vital to the Earth’s water and energy cycles, air quality and climate.
Ball Corporation (NYSE:BLL)’s Civil Space and Technology’s vice president and general manager, Jim Oschmann said that the company has already been into the development of lidar technology and thus, sees the recently awarded contract as a way to progress in the instrument technology for future global Earth system studies.
