CU Boulder, Ball Aerospace sign 5-year collaboration deal

BOULDER — Ball Aerospace and the University of Colorado Boulder on Tuesday announced they have signed a five-year agreement that will help students and faculty to work with Ball Aerospace to carry out sponsored research and contribute to Ball Aerospace’s talent pipeline and partner on projects.

The Master University Research Agreement will apply to a variety of activities, including government-sponsored research and development work, Ball Aerospace-funded work, consulting services and student design projects.

“Our relationship with Ball Aerospace is truly a special one and this agreement demonstrates our commitment to nurturing and growing this unique partnership,” said Terri Fiez, CU Boulder’s vice chancellor for research and innovation. “Our faculty, staff and students will reap the benefits of the greater ease of partnering on research and student projects, and we’ll continue to bring value to Ball Aerospace and Colorado’s aerospace industry through our collaborative research outputs and contributions.”

SPONSORED CONTENT

How Platte River Power Authority is accelerating its energy transition

Platte River Power Authority, the community-owned wholesale electricity provider for Northern Colorado, has a history of bold initiatives.

Ball Aerospace in Boulder, a subsidiary of Broomfield-based Ball Corp. (NYSE: BLL), is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2016-17 and was incorporated at the dawn of the space age as the Ball Brothers Research Corp. Since the early days, Ball Aerospace and CU Boulder have partnered resulting in helping advance the understanding of the solar system with the design and building of innovative spacecraft and instruments.

“This agreement allows us to efficiently build upon our long and storied heritage of working together, leveraging some of the nation’s best and brightest research and talent to develop critical technologies that go beyond, explore, discover and protect the nation,” said Michael Gazarik, vice president of engineering at Ball Aerospace.

Through its collaborations, CU Boulder and Ball Aerospace have teamed on several NASA contracts, including the recently announced NASA Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer mission to study black holes.

One of the most successful collaborations is an instrument designed by CU Boulder scientists at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy and built by Ball Aerospace that is on the Hubble Space Telescope. The instrument, called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, is being used to look back in time to reconstruct the physical conditions of the early universe, probing the evolution of galaxies, stars and intergalactic matter by breaking down ultraviolet light.