Harris gets satellite control contract extension ahead of cloud shift

Harris Corp. has received a three-year, $284 million extension on a contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to modernize the ground computing infrastructure that helps control weather monitoring satellites.

NOAA wants to lay the foundation for a future migration of that infrastructure to cloud environments, Harris said Thursday.

That ground segment controls the two newest satellites in NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-R series constellation also known as “GOES-R” and will also operate a pair of additional spacecraft after launch.

GOES-R’s ground control segment collects and processes 3.5 terabytes of data per day for weather forecasting, fire detection and other public safety information used by NOAA’s National Weather Service and 10,000 other direct users.

Weather data and products are generated in less than 30 seconds with space weather in 1.8 seconds, according to Harris.

The extension raises the value of that Harris contract with NOAA to $1.65 billion over 13 years.