Albuquerque, N.M.-based Emcore Corp. said Sept. 26 that it has been awarded a solar panel manufacturing contract by Orbital Sciences Corp. for NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat)-2 missions targeted for launch in early 2016.
Under the contract, the value of which was not disclosed, Emcore will provide a set of solar panels populated with Emcore’s ZTJ triple-junction solar cells. Dulles, Va.-based Orbital is building ICESat-2 for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., using a spacecraft design derived from the company’s LEOStar-3 bus — the same spacecraft structure used for NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission, GeoEye’s GeoEye-1 imaging satellite and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.