NPOESS Field Terminal Updates

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Defense (DoD), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly acquiring the next-generation weather and environmental satellite system; the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). NPOESS replaces the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) managed by the DoD. The NPOESS satellites carry a suite of sensors that collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological, and solar-geophysical observations of the earth, atmosphere, and space. The ground data processing segment for NPOESS is the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS), developed by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. The IDPS processes NPOESS satellite data to provide environmental data products (aka, Environmental Data Records or EDRs) to NOAA and DoD processing centers operated by the United States government. The IDPS will process EDRs beginning with the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and continuing through the lifetime of the NPOESS system. IDPS also provides the software and requirements for the Field Terminal Segment (FTS).

NPOESS provides support to deployed field terminals by providing mission data in the Low Rate and High Rate downlinks (LRD/HRD), mission support data needed to generate EDRs and decryption keys needed to decrypt mission data during Selective data Encryption (SDE). Mission support data consists of globally relevant data, geographically constrained data, and two line element sets. NPOESS provides these mission support data via the Internet accessible Mission Support Data Server and HRD/LRD downlinks. This presentation will illustrate and describe the NPOESS capabilities in support of Field Terminal users. This discussion will include the mission support data available to Field Terminal users, content of the direct broadcast HRD and LRD downlinks identifying differences between the direct broadcast downlinks including the variability of the LRD downlink and NPOESS management and distribution of decryption keys to approved field terminals using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) AES standard with 256 bit encryption and elliptical curve cryptography.