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NESDIS Announces First Set of BAA Contract Awards

November 9, 2020
Artist's digital rendering of the JPSS-1/NOAA-20 satellite
Artist's rendering of the JPSS-1/NOAA-20 satellite.

Monday, April 13, 2020

NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service (NESDIS) announced the first in a series of contract awards to develop mission, spacecraft and instrument concepts for future Earth observation capabilities.

The new concepts NESDIS is considering in this initial round are atmospheric temperature and pressure sounding observations in low earth orbit (LEO) and broader mission approaches for geostationary earth orbits (GEO) and extended orbits (GEO-XO). NESDIS will use the results of these analyses to inform the design, acquisition, development, and launch of a cost-effective, agile satellite architecture to support NOAA’s mission in the coming decades.

These contracts follow a pair of Broad Agency Announcements NESDIS issued last Fall, calling for ideas from the commercial and research sector. After a formal review of the white papers over this past winter, NESDIS directed Requests for Proposals to selected entities.

NESDIS will award additional contracts over the next month and anticipates completing these analyses this year.

More details on the contracts awarded to date are available here.