It All Filters Down to Barr Playing Ball

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. recently selected Barr Associates, Inc. to develop, manufacture and test multi-spectral filters for the Operational Land Imager (OLI) they are building for NASA/USGS. These are high-end performance versions of a filter array technology developed and refined over several years by Barr. The filters are designated multi-spectral, as each filter assembly consists of nine individual spectral bands, while a full instrument compliment consists of 14, closely matched filter assemblies. This dynamic duo has quite a history that dates back to 1979 with a project called SAGE II which measured atmospheric gas concentrations. Since then, Barr has provided filters to Ball projects including high profile examples like the Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and those less well known such as the Deep Impact cometary Mission and New Horizons. The New Horizons spacecraft has a Ralph instrument which was launched two years ago and is cruising toward Pluto with a planned rendezvous in 2015. It is carrying a Barr multi-spectral filter similar to the OLI filters—Boulder, Colorado