WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- TRW Inc. defeated a rival bid from Lockheed Martin to build NASA's successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the space agency announced Tuesday.
"TRW is proud to be NASA's selection for this important mission," said Tim Hannemann, the company's space & electronics president.
The hotly competed contract, valued at $825 million, follows last month's $3 billion award to TRW to build the government's next-generation meteorological satellite system -- a project that also drew a bid from Lockheed Martin's Missiles & Space Operations of Sunnyvale, Calif.
"Lockheed has lost a number of contracts recently, but there are a number of other awards coming next year also," industry analyst Jon Kutler, with Quarterdeck Investment Partners in Los Angeles, told United Press International.
"I don't draw any conclusions from this award," he added. "Right now, there's such a tailwind (from military spending) that everybody's gaining."
NASA also announced it was renaming the Next Generation Space Telescope after the agency's second administrator, James Webb, a powerful force behind the successful U.S. effort to land humans on the moon in the 1960s and '70s and a strong supporter of space science missions. Agency officials said the Hubble replacement observatory, which is targeted for launch in 2010, will be called the James Webb Space Telescope.
"It is fitting that Hubble's successor be named in honor of James Webb," said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe. "He took our nation on its first voyages of exploration, turning our imagination into reality."
The Webb telescope is being designed to image and study the universe's first stars and galaxies -- entities that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang explosion. Unlike Hubble, the new telescope will not be serviceable in orbit by astronauts because it will be too far from Earth -- roughly 960,000 million miles away.
The distance simplifies design and cuts cost for sunshades and cooling systems to keep the telescope's infrared instruments at the required temperatures to detect the faint, cold radiation of distant galaxies, said project manager Bernard Seery, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
TRW, of Redondo Beach, Calif., is being hired to design and build the spacecraft, its foldable primary mirror -- which is expected to be about three times the size of Hubble's 2.4-meter (about 8 feet) mirror -- as well as integrate the science instrument module. The telescope is to be packed inside and carried into orbit aboard an expendable launch vehicle. Its mirror and tennis court-sized sun shield, both based on recently declassified military technology, will be deployed in orbit.
The observatory will have three science instruments: a near-infrared camera, to be built by the University of Arizona in Tucson in partnership with scientists sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency; a near-infrared spectrometer, provided by the European Space Agency using detectors and a micro-shutter provided by NASA; and a mid-infrared camera/spectrometer to be built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in partnership with a consortium of European institutions overseen by the European Space Agency. The Canadian Space Agency will provide the telescope's fine guidance sensors.
The TRW team includes Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., and Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y.
(Reported by Irene Brown, UPI Science News, at Cape Canaveral, Fla.)
