Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS) Overview and Architectural Tenets

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). The Joint Polar Satellite System will replace the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA. The JPSS satellites will carry a suite of sensors designed to collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological and geophysical observations of the Earth.

The ground processing system for JPSS is known as the JPSS Common Ground System (JPSS CGS). Developed and maintained by Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS), the CGS is a multi-mission enterprise system serving NOAA, NASA and their national and international partners. The CGS provides a wide range of support to a number of missions:

1) Command and control and mission management for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) mission today, expanding this support to the JPSS-1 satellite and the Free Flyer-1 mission in 2017

2) Data acquisition via a Polar Receptor Network (PRN) for S-NPP, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W1), POES, and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and Coriolis/WindSat for the Department of Defense (DoD)

3) Data routing over a global fiber Wide Area Network (WAN) for S-NPP, JPSS-1, Polar Free Flyer, GCOM-W1, POES, DMSP, Coriolis/WindSat, the NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN, which includes several Earth Observing System [EOS] missions), MetOp for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the National Science Foundation (NSF)

4) Environmental data processing and distribution for S-NPP, GCOM-W1 and JPSS-1

Originally designed to support S-NPP and JPSS, the CGS has demonstrated its scalability and flexibility to incorporate all of these other important missions efficiently and with minimal cost, schedule and risk, while strengthening global partnerships in weather and environmental monitoring.

Since S-NPP launch in October 2011, the data processing and distribution portion of CGS has successfully undergone a significant technology refresh to more efficiently support S-NPP and GCOM-W1 data production and delivery, and the global communications infrastructure has been upgraded with additional redundancy to avoid system outages.

The CGS architecture will receive another technology refresh in 2015 to satisfy several key objectives:

1) “Operationalizing” Suomi NPP, which had originally been intended as a risk reduction mission

2) Leveraging lessons learned to date in multi-mission support

3) Taking advantage of newer, more reliable and efficient technologies

4) Satisfying new requirements and constraints due to the continually evolving budgetary environment

To meet these needs, we are upgrading the CGS in the following ways: 1) Performing a system-wide technology refresh for enhanced performance and security

2) Establishing a new front end architecture and augmenting the PRN for mission data transport

3) Standardizing data protocols to accommodate an even wider variety of missions

4) Enhancing flexibility and modularity in IDPS for new and evolving algorithms

5) Achieving comprehensive situational awareness

6) Deploying a full backup capability for Continuity of Operations (COOP)

7) Providing an enclave in compliance with the latest security standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53

This paper will provide an overview of the CGS as it is deployed and operating today, along with a summary of the architectural tenets that will facilitate even easier incorporation of new missions and applications in 2015.