This is the latest of a long series of Barr – Ball collaborations extending back to a 1979 project called SAGE II. Sage II measured atmospheric gas concentrations. In the intervening years Barr has provided filters to Ball projects including high profile examples like the Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and those less well known such as the Deep Impact cometary mission http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html and New Horizons http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html.The New Horizons spacecraft with its Ralph instrument was launched two years ago and is presently cruising toward Pluto with a planned rendezvous in 2015. It is carrying a Barr multi-spectral filter similar to the OLI filters.
LDCM is the first of a new generation of the thirty five year old Landsat series of Earth observing satellites. NASA is responsible for building and launching the satellite which will be operated by the USGS. Barr filters are flying on the last of the old generation spacecraft (Landsat 7 / ETM+ imager). A technology demonstration mission named EO-1, developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a precursor to LDCM. Barr provided the multi-spectral filters for EO-1. Other US civil Earth observing missions carrying Barr multi-spectral filters include MISR, MODIS, OrbView, WorldView (used by Google Earth) and NextView.