NASA recognizes Ball Aerospace for work on Kepler space telescope

BOULDER — Ball Aerospace recently received a Group Achievement Award from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

The award recognized the company for creating solutions to allow for the continued use of the Kepler spacecraft for the K2 science mission, according to a company news release.

After Kepler completed its primary mission, the second of four reaction wheels on Kepler ceased to work properly, preventing Kepler from continuing to point with precision. In May 2013, the Ball Aerospace Flight Planning Center (FPC) prevented a potential mission ending failure by devising a way to use the solar pressure hitting Kepler and combining that with some of the thrusters to control the telescope.

For nearly a decade, the Kepler and K2 missions have observed more than a half million stars. NASA retired the space telescope on Oct. 30.

“The Ball Aerospace culture fosters a collaborative and inclusive work environment, which enables us to understand the needs of, and work closely with, our NASA customer,” Makenzie Lystrup, Ball Aerospace vice president and general manager, said in a prepared statement. “The team’s creative and collaborative approach became the K2 mission, which enabled further exploration and data gathering in our search for life, helping to uncover that our universe has far more planets than we ever imagined.”

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