Raytheon’s Intelligence, Information and Services business has secured $59m in funding from NASA to perform additional work on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS) project.
The additional work will be conducted to support the further development of NOAA’s next polar satellite, JPSS-2, which is scheduled for launch by 2021.
It will involve changes to be made to the command and control system and the orbital dynamics system that will manoeuvre the JPSS-2 satellite while in orbit.
As part of the latest contract, Raytheon will also upgrade the system’s simulation and cybersecurity capabilities, as well as expand its wide area network and security incident response team.
The contract has brought the total value of the JPSS CGS contract awarded by NASA to Raytheon to just under $2bn.
Raytheon Navigation, Weather and Services mission vice-president Matt Gilligan said: “JPSS-2 is different from its predecessors, but we’ve built the ground system to be flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of any satellite manufacturer for any weather mission.”
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By GlobalDataThe JPSS CGS has recently concluded the critical design review for the additional work, while compatibility testing between the satellite and ground system is scheduled to begin by early 2020.
Developed by NASA for NOAA, the JPSS CGS is designed to gather and distribute observations from polar-orbiting weather satellites from the US, Europe and Japan.
The JPSS-2 satellite will be equipped with four sensing instruments, including Raytheon’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which has already passed its pre-ship review and is ready for delivery ahead of schedule.
VIIRS is capable of increasing the precision of weather forecasting and predicting storm patterns and atmospheric changes, among other works.
