Tower-Jazz and NASA signed a cooperation agreement for the development and production of components for the lunar orbiter LADEE

NASA chose a solution from the Israeli Tower-Jazz and the American ADSANTEC, based on Tower's SiGe technology for the development of space applications; most of the revenue will be received from NASA thanks to the joint development project

Tower Semiconductor and Jazz Semiconductor (of the Tower Group) announced today that the company's SiGe technology has been selected by NASA to develop an application for a research mission that will examine the dust environment in the lunar atmosphere. The mission, Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE, will be carried out in an orbit that will circle the moon and its main purpose is to characterize the dust environment of the moon in order to determine the density, composition and changes over time The moon's fragile atmosphere has yet to be exposed to human activities and it will deliver optical data at a rate of over 500 megabytes per second.The mission's launch date is set for May 1, 2012.

The application will be based on a technological solution based on Jazz's advanced SiGe platform and ADSANTEC design techniques. This solution was also chosen by JPL for a future mission to Mars.

"Jazz's industry-leading SiGe technology allows us to systematically achieve rapid success in developing applications for the space and land industries," said Dr. Vladimir Katzman, President of ADSANTEC. "We are excited to continue and expand our collaboration with Jazz on- By implementing our design and making it available for Jazz customers." Currently, ADSANTEC supplies components produced in Jazz to a number of world's leading customers in the field the media

"We are very pleased to partner with ADSANTEC to develop NASA's lunar research mission," said Dr. Marco Recanelli, Senior Vice President and Director of the RF and HPA Group, and the Defense and Space Group at Tower and Jazz. Thanks to this project, we will win more customers in the space sector."