Raytheon Company has selected SGI to work on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) “R” Series program.

SGI is supporting the program definition and risk reduction phase of the GOES-R program. In October 2005, Raytheon and prime contractor Northrop Grumman Corporation were awarded a six-month GOES-R program definition and risk reduction contract by NOAA.

GOES-R will collect up to 100 times more data and scan the Earth three-to-five times faster than previous systems, providing improved spatial, spectral and temporal resolution. These advances will provide more environmental products and services that can be used for many applications, including hurricane track and intensity forecasts and monitoring of coastal waters or coastal resource management. Improved products and services are critical to NOAA’s missions for monitoring weather and water, climate, oceans and ecosystems, commerce and transportation.

SGI will provide support to Raytheon related to the provision of data processing hardware and system software, maintenance, and optimization of GOES-R specific applications on target platforms. Specific areas for SGI support are related to the Product Generation (PG) and Product Distribution (PD) elements of the Ground Segment (GS). An additional possible area of SGI support includes the User Interface (UI) element.

GOES-R, which is currently under development with first launch scheduled for late 2012, is a significant technological advancement for NOAA in terms of the quality and quantity of meteorological and environmental satellite data. The combined instrument downlink data rate will increase by a factor of 60. The amount of environmental data being rebroadcast to users throughout the hemisphere will increase by an order of magnitude and information products will increase from 43 to more than 150.