The national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) has partnered with the national aeronautics and space administration (NASA) to implement the joint polar satellite system (jpss) program.…

This federal contract award supports the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program, a partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA serves as the acquisition and system integration agent for NOAA's development of the JPSS flight and ground systems. The JPSS program will provide continuous environmental satellite observations and data critical for understanding and predicting weather, climate, oceans, and coastal changes.

The $2,428,017.87 cost-plus-fixed-fee delivery order was awarded to The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), to provide systems engineering, operations, and technical management support, as well as specialized engineering services for the JPSS instruments and development activities. This order was issued under The Aerospace Corporation's $709 million single-award IDIQ contract with NASA and $72.3 million IDIQ contract with NOAA. The contract does not have a set-aside designation.

The national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) has partnered with the national aeronautics and space administration (NASA) to implement the joint polar satellite system (jpss) program. Nasas role is to serve as noaas acquisition and system integration agent in the development of the flight and ground systems of jpss, which NOAA then operates. The jpss program will implement noaas requirements for collection of global multi spectral radiometry and other specialized meteorological, and oceanographic data via remote sensing of land, sea, and atmospheric data. These data will support noaas mission for continuous observation of the earths environment necessary to understand and predict changes in weather, climate, oceans and coasts, which support the nations economy, and protect lives and property. 2.1. The jpss will also provide operational continuity of satellite based observations and products for noaas polar orbiting operational environmental satellites (poes) and the suomi national polar orbiting partnership (s-NPP) satellite. Jpss will consist of a series of missions involving environmental sensing satellites in the 1330 local time ascending node (ltan) sun synchronous polar orbit, and the ground system required to support them. 2.2. The flight project consists of the spacecraft, instruments and launch vehicle. Planned for a 7 year mission lifetime, each jpss mission satellite will operate in a polar, sun synchronous mission orbit at a nominal altitude of 824 KM and 1330 local time of ascending node crossing (ltan). The jpss-1 mission instrument complement includes the visible infrared imaging radiometer suite (viirs), the cross track infrared sounder (cris), the advanced technology microwave sounder (atms), the ozone mapping profiler suite nadir profiler (omps-n), and the clouds and the earths radiant energy system (ceres) instrument. On jpss-2/3/4 the ceres instrument is replaced by the radiation budget instrument (RBI). The launch segment provides those assets and services associated with the launch vehicle (LV) and the payload integration necessary to place the jpss satellite into the mission orbit. 2.3. In order to assure the success of the jpss development, gsfc requires systems engineering, operations and technical management support staff from the aerospace corporation as well as specialized engineering support services for technical and science developments in support of instrument procurement, integration, testing and anomaly investigation activities.