Raytheon has relocated its environmental satellite ground sustainment team to Maryland as part of a move to upgrade the existing satellite system of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The team that maintains the NASA/NOAA joint polar satellite system common ground system moved from Aurora, Colorado, to Riverdale near NOAA’s satellite operations facility in Suitland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Raytheon said Thursday.
“The move ensures we are sustaining the program in close proximity to our customer, and enables efficient extensibility of the common ground system to new missions,†said Mark Sargent, JPSS common ground system program director.
Raytheon plans to upgrade the JPSS’ data retrieval, mission support and architecture at the end of 2015.
The planned upgrade aims to protect operations from interruption and the equipment from cyber threats.
The Raytheon common ground system, built under contract with NASA for NOAA, provides mission planning, command, control and communications, data routing and data processing for satellite programs.