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Climate models must account for several sources of uncertainty in their analysis; one mayor such source is the effect of clouds, and ice clouds in particular. The effect of ice particles embedded in the clouds is poorly constrained, which allows ice clouds to be used as a tuning parameter to balance the budget of incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere. This lack of precise knowledge of cloud ice and of accuracy in its microphysical property leads to large uncertainty about clouds and their processes within the atmosphere. NASA's Aerosol, Cloud and Ecosystems (ACE), an Earth Science Decadal Survey (DS) mission, recommends that a science payload with submillimeterwave (sub-mm) and longwave infrared (LWIR) radiometers be developed for such cloud ice measurement.This paper reports on the effort to design, build and deploy such an instrument.