POES Extended Life - A Successful Partnership to Transition Government Satellite Operations (NOAA) to a Private Sector Service Provider (Parsons)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) mission has supported over 45 years of terrestrial weather monitoring. NOAA has recently transitioned operations for its remaining satellites to a commercial cloud-based satellite ground service hosted by Parsons Corporation. This transition of constellation flight operations to commercial cloud-based ground systems is a first for NOAA satellite operations and has generated significant lessons learned that will inform future activities. This talk will describe the technical processes and the coordination required among the team of Government staff and Contractors to accomplish the rapid operational transition of constellation operations from a legacy Government system into a modern cloud-based service framework.

The POES mission is a series of satellites in polar sun synchronous orbits, the first of which TIROS-N was launched in 1978. Currently, three satellites remain operational within the POES constellation: NOAA-15 (1998), NOAA-18 (2005), and NOAA-19 (2009). With the successful launch of the next generation of polar orbiting weather satellites, S-NPP (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership), NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 under the follow-on Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program, the legacy POES constellation were initially forecasted to be decommissioned by Sept. 30, 2022. However, after consultation with NOAA and its science community, it was determined that further continuing operations of POES as a secondary, best-effort data source would be a valuable complement to the flagship JPSS Mission. Data collected from the POES constellation continues to support a broad range of environmental monitoring applications, including weather analysis and forecasting, atmospheric soundings of temperature and humidity, volcanic eruption monitoring, forest fire detection, global vegetation analysis, and providing support for legacy search and rescue applications.

NOAA continued operations of the POES constellation beyond its previously planned end-of-life through a competitive acquisition called POES Extended Life (EL), which continues operations of the legacy satellites for three additional years under a cloud-based services contract. Parsons today is fully operating this constellation on its cloud-based ground system and is providing critical scientific observations to NOAA in near-real-time. NOAA has been able to decommission its legacy ground system, which has resulted in cost savings to NOAA as well as strategic improvements in cybersecurity for NOAA's Satellite Operations portfolio.