AURORA, Colo., August 28 -- Raytheon Co. has been awarded a contract for work on the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) by NPOESS prime contractor TRW. The value of the contract to Raytheon is approximately $1 billion over the life of the program.
NPOESS merges the meteorological and earth observation functions of three US government agencies: the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense and NASA. The program provides polar-orbiting remote sensing capability, while achieving cost savings by converging existing government satellite programs.
Raytheon is slated to provide the entire ground system for NPOESS, including the command, control and communications segment and the interface data processing segment.
Under another contract, Raytheon is also developing and manufacturing the NPOESS primary electro-optical imaging sensor at its Santa Barbara, Calif., facility.
The Raytheon NPOESS team is based at the company's Aurora business campus. Up to 450 Raytheon employees will work on the program.