Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. successfully delivered the CloudSat weather and climate spacecraft to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., for launch later this year. CloudSat is part of the multi-satellite, multi-sensor National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) experiment designed to reveal information of clouds and improve weather and climate predictions.

Ball Aerospace built the CloudSat spacecraft under contract from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which included testing and integrating the payload, as part of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) program.

Ball Aerospace also will support CloudSat launch operations and initial on-orbit commissioning. The spacecraft is scheduled for launch jointly with its Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) sister satellite. Ball Aerospace built CALIPSO’s lidar and wide field camera.