Key Features of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) System Architecture

The National Polar-Orbiting NPOESS, a tri-agency program, provides a critical, timely, reliable, and high quality space-based sensing capability to acquire and process global and regional environmental imagery and specialized meteorological, climatic, terrestrial, oceanographic, solar-geophysical, and other data products.

The NPOESS architecture is built on a foundation of affordability, and the three pillars of data quality, latency, and availability. Affordability refers to an over-arching awareness of cost to provide the best value to the government for implementing a converged system. Data quality is characterized in terms of the attributes associated with Environmental Data Records (EDRs), and the products that are delivered to the four US Operational Centrals and field users. Data latency refers to the time period between the detection of energy by a space-borne sensor to the delivery of a corresponding EDR. Availability refers to both data availability and system operational availability. Overall, the NPOESS architecture successfully delivers to the government a best-value solution featuring high data quality, low data latency, and high data/system availability.