Attachment II - Sole Source Justification_Redacted.pdf

Through international agreements with the International VLBI Service (IVS) The NEOS correlator at USNO agrees to correlate IVS sessions that contain international baselines coming from Russia and China. By buffering, inspecting and validating such data at MIT before making it available to the DiFX correlator the vulnerability of accepting such data is mitigated, which will reduce the risk of reliance on EOP foreign data sources and has important ramifications for DoD Continuity of Operations Plan.

MIT Haystack Observatory is the sole developer and maintainer of the HOPS software and IVS standard VLBI data formats. Only they have the necessary expertise to detect problematic data or anomalies within the data.

It is found that no other institution, government or private, is capable of providing the data validation required, therefore USNO must work with MIT to obtain the secure transfer services. MIT is the only source capable of supplying the required services.