INDUSTRY PARTNERS
EDGE industry partners have extensive history of successful instrument and mission experience, including working together on GEDI, ICESat/GLAS, and ICESat-2/ATLAS
Maxar has extensive experience building and operating Earth-observing and communications spacecraft. EDGE uses the Maxar 500 spacecraft, a mid-size platform based on its WorldView Legion (WVL) line, and EDGE is operated as part of the WVL constellation. The stable and agile Maxar 500 spacecraft is ideal for EDGE, enabling the precise pointing and targeting needed to fulfill the science objectives. GSFC’s laser altimeter instrument is integrated with the spacecraft bus at Maxar’s proven integration facility.
General Dynamics will be manufacturing the 1.2 m diameter Beryllium (Be) telescope for EDGE based on the 0.8 m Be telescopes flown on ICESat-2 and GEDI. General Dynamics has unique manufacturing, diamond-turning, and precise optical polishing capability and has successfully delivered multiple meter-scale, lightweight, optical Be telescopes for NASA missions. Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is responsible for the refractive aft-optics, utilizing three spherical fused silica lenses, assembled into a Ti lens barrel, provide diffraction-limited performance over the 1-degree Field-of-View.
Fibertek will be building the 5 flight lasers and 5 digital beam scanners for EDGE. These lasers rely on core technology used in NASA’s airborne Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) lasers, developed by Fibertek, which have supported numerous airborne campaigns over the past 10 years. The EDGE lasers utilize several components from the TRL-9 ICESat-2 lasers launched in 2018, which have accumulated over 5 years of failure-free on-orbit operation. The EDGE digital beam scanner is a derivative of the NASA GEDI solid-state beam scanners that have performed flawlessly on-orbit for over 4 years.
