Ball aerospace´s deep space mission architecture and capabilities

Ball Aerospace has provided hardware for many missions in deep space including the complete flight systems for the highly successful deep impact mission and the soon to be launched Kepler planet finding mission. Deep space instruments include the HiRISE camera at Mars, the Ralph camera for New Horizons (on its way to Pluto), the two Spitzer instruments and the telescope, and the telescope for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observatory. Ball continues to work towards future deep space mission opportunities. This paper describes our deep space mission spacecraft bus work (Micromissions and Starlight mission concept architectures, and the Deep Impact and Kepler mission architectures), earth remote sensing bus background and discusses Ball Aerospace spacecraft architecture directions in light of these concepts and missions. We cover our mission design work to support deep space missions.