At their annual meeting on October 15, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) named Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation as the 2013 Colorado Photonics Company of the Year. The company was selected from more than 200 companies in the aerospace, renewable energy, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and electronics industries involved in photonics, or light-based, technologies. Ball is the only company to repeat as winner of this prestigious award, having previously won in 2002. 
Ball is one of many companies that make outstanding contributions to the Colorado photonics cluster. These companies bring international attention to Colorado as a place to conduct business.
Reasons for recognizing Ball span several years and include the following:
- The Deep Impact project: Ball designed and manufactured the optical spectrometer that observed the collision between the comet Temple I and the man-made interceptor.
- Kepler: Ball designed the telescope that has detected several hundred earth-like planets from other solar systems.
- Ball designed every currently operational instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Ball completed delivery of the next generation Operational Land Imager (9 band earth observing spectrometer).
- Ball designed the optical System for the DoD Space Based Surveillance System that went operational in 2012.
- Ball designed the Ozone Mapping Profiler Instrument that went operational in 2011 on the Suomi Weather Satellite.
- Ball designed and built the camera system on the latest Mars Rover.
- Ball is near completion of the 10-segment Primary Mirror Assembly for the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope that will allow researchers to literally see back to the beginning of time (although not until the year 2018).
Ball Aerospace was started in Boulder County in 1956, about a year before the start of the great space race.
©Copyright 2011 by CBER.