Teledyne wins $15m NASA contract

Teledyne Technologies’ subsidiary Teledyne Brown Engineering has won a $15 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the provision of hyperspectral remote-sensing imagery from an instrument to be based on the International Space Station (ISS).

The hyperspectral instrument, being built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), will be integrated by Teledyne onto the Multi-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) earth-observation platform on the ISS.

As the first instrument to be installed on the MUSES platform, the hyperspectral sensor is an advanced spectrometer, working in the wavelength range from visible through the near infrared, which is expected to be capable of acquiring more than 70 million square kilometres of data each year.

The MUSES platform will host up to three other Earth-observing instruments at a time for additional commercial or government imaging applications.

“Our partnerships with NASA and DLR further expand the commercial use of the ISS, while providing our governments with unique imaging data,” said Robert Mehrabian, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Teledyne.

“Specifically, the volume of hyperspectral data expected to be obtained will assist NASA scientists with a variety of applications in forestry and agricultural management, atmospheric research and other areas of scientific and humanitarian importance.”

Teledyne currently expects MUSES to be operational in 2016, with the hyperspectral instrument and imagery beginning in 2017.