Evolving the NOAA GEO Satellites Ground Station: A Multi-Mission Data Operations Solution in the Cloud

The GEO Ground System (GS) has successfully supported the Geosynchronous Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R series mission through the launch and operation plan of four GOES satellites and the first Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO) instrument, the Compact Coronagraph (CCOR), on GOES-19. The GEO GS was also upgraded to support operations of the Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) satellite scheduled for launch in 2025.

As the GEO program looks to prepare for the future, with the impending addition of the GeoXO and Space Weather (SW) Next L1A & B satellite missions, and the realities and challenges associated with the Operations and Maintenance costs of such a large infrastructure, the program is looking towards cloud-technologies to optimize resources, enable a more agile culture and prepare for the support of the next-generation ground system architecture.

This presentation will identify key drivers, both internal and external, influencing the GEO Ground Project’s strategy for evolving capabilities to cloud-based technologies. The discussions will tie key drivers such as costs, obsolescence, system multi-mission scalability, agility and enterprise alignment, among others, to cloud migration and system simplification efforts. It will also communicate how the GEO Ground Project management is responding to those drivers by establishing a Roadmap to the future, and how management processes and development methodologies, such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), have been leveraged and employed to ensure that the vision of the evolving Ground System is being realized.