Leidos keeps Air Force nuclear test data system contract

Leidos will continue helping the Air Force run a data acquisition and processing system that monitors foreign nuclear tests.

Leidos has kept its role on an Air Force contract to help operate a data acquisition and processing system that works to monitor for, locate and identify foreign nuclear test activity.

Reston, Virginia-based Leidos was awarded the second iteration of the U.S. National Data Center Operations Support and Studies contract on Aug. 15. The new contract has a $46.5 million ceiling value over up to six years and Leidos was the lone bidder, according to the Defense Department’s awards digest and a FedBizOpps notice.

The company was first awarded the work in 2015 under an estimated $20.5 million sole-source contract, according to Deltek data.

Researchers for the U.S. NDC collect waveform data from seismic and other stations around the world so researchers, national security agencies and policy makers can monitor compliance with nuclear test ban treaties.

U.S. NDC acts as the geophysical component of the country’s atomic energy detection system run by the Air Force’s Technical Operations Center.

Leidos’ scope of work includes maintenance, sustainment, configuration management, database and system administration, development, testing and integration of geophysical data processing software, hardware, and the data itself.

The new contract also involves studies to improve and develop tools and methodologies for data collection, data analysis, event detection, event association, event location, event magnitude/yield estimation, event classification, seismic signatures repository, and advanced geophysical data processing.