The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly acquiring the next-generation civilian weather and environmental satellite system: the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). JPSS will contribute the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the restructured National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). As such, JPSS replaces the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA and the ground processing component of both POES and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) replacement known as the Defense Weather Satellite System (DWSS), managed by the Department of Defense (DoD). The JPSS satellites will carry a suite of sensors designed to collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological, and solar-geophysical observations of the earth, atmosphere, and space. The ground processing system for JPSS is known as the JPSS Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), and consists primarily of a Command, Control, and Communications Segment (C3S), Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) and the Field Terminal Segment (FTS). All three segments are developed by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS). The IDPS will process NPP, JPSS and DWSS satellite data to provide environmental data products to NOAA and DoD processing centers operated by the United States government.

The first of the JPSS satellites, known as the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite, is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2011. Following a phase of sensor activation, full volume data traffic will flow from the satellite through C3S and into the IDPS for data processing. While data products will not be generally available until after the Calibration/Validation period is complete, an early look at the ground processing system performance is possible soon after sensor activation. This presentation will provide details of ground system processing performance, such as data rates through each of the C3S nodes, data accounting statistics, and retransmission rates and success, along with IDPS throughput, data availability, and latency.