National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Program Overview

The tri-agency Integrated Program Office (IPO) is responsible for managing the development of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). The Northrop Grumman (NG) - Raytheon team was competitively selected as the Acquisition and Operations (A&O) contractor team to develop and field NPOESS. Under the Shared System Performance Responsibility (SSPR) arrangement, NG manages (develops, produces, implements, and operates) the system to fulfill validated performance requirements. The government shares responsibility with the NG - Raytheon team in ensuring that the system satisfies the provisions in the NPOESS system specification. NPOESS, comprised of the spacecraft, instruments and sensors on the spacecraft, the command, control and communications infrastructure, data processing software and hardware, and launch support capabilities, completed preliminary design in June 2005. The operational NPOESS constellation, consisting of satellites in three orbital planes, will provide significantly improved operational capabilities and benefits to satisfy critical civil and national security requirements for space-based, remotely sensed environmental data. With the development of NPOESS, the U.S. is evolving operational “weather” satellites into integrated environmental observing systems by expanding National capabilities to observe, assess, and predict the total Earth system - atmosphere, ocean, land, and the space environment. The higher resolution data from NPOESS will enable more accurate short-term weather forecasts and severe storm warnings. As one cornerstone of an Integrated Global Observing System, NPOESS will also provide sustained, space-based measurements to ensure continuity of data for monitoring, understanding, and predicting climate change and its impacts on seasonal and longer time scales. The NPOESS program also includes the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), a risk reduction mission managed jointly by the NPOESS IPO and NASA. It provides an opportunity for NPOESS to demonstrate and validate new sensors, algorithms, and operational processing capabilities, and to test many components of the system prior to the first NPOESS flight. NPP also provides continuity between the current Earth Observing System (EOS) and NPOESS for select remotely sensed data that support global climate studies and research.