Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. won a $3.9 million contract from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Air Force to develop and test lightweight mirror segments for ultra-light space applications.

The company will develop a 1.4-meter Beryllium mirror during the next 24 months that will operate at both ambient and cryogenic temperatures. “This is a very important win for us and we are proud to be one of the selected contractors to push the state of the art in space optics to new heights,” said Doug Neam, manager of Ball’s Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) program.

The contract is a follow-on to a $300,000 Phase I award made in 1999 to develop mirror designs for the NGST, Space Based Laser and other space imaging programs. Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Bolder, Colo., is a subsidiary of Ball Corp. [BLL].

Ball said Raytheon Co. [RTN] and Eastman Kodak Co. [EK] also won contracts for the large lightweight mirror segments.