On Sept. 10, NOAA awarded a $1,092,689 contract to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), of Pasadena, Calif., to explore and then deliver a report on potential measures to detect, identify, characterize and mitigate the corruption of radio frequency (RF) bands used for passive sensing by Earth observing satellites.
This is an important area of study, as RF emissions from increasingly congested band sources, such as private sector satellites and advanced wireless services, can corrupt data from the adjacent RF sensitive Earth observing satellites used to produce weather forecasts and climate services.
JPL will report to NOAA options/strategies to mitigate corrupting data:
- Identify and characterize emissions that interfere or corrupt within a passive band;
- Reduce the impact from the interfering or corrupting emissions;
- Identify associated risks, processes and modifications needed to implement more robust passive remote sensing on an international basis; and
- Processes and resources required to implement the mitigation approach.
As a Joint Venture Partnerships Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), this contract will explore the development of techniques for future applications, but is not an operational mission or associated with an operational mission. The scope of work supported by this BAA is exploratory in nature. NOAA currently has no plans to support an RFI detection or mitigation satellite mission at this time.
The Joint Venture Partnerships program, operated by NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), oversees the contract.
The contracts are managed by the Joint Venture Partnerships program, which is a program of the Office of Systems Architecture and Engineering, NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
NOAA made the award September 10th, following a down-select process that began with a Broad Agency Announcement that was issued on March 30, 2023, and included review and evaluation of proposals by subject matter experts.