Adding a Mission to the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS)

Abstract:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly acquiring the next-generation civilian weather and environmental satellite system: the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). The Joint Polar Satellite System will replace the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA. The JPSS satellites will carry a suite of sensors designed to collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological and geophysical observations of the Earth.

The ground processing system for JPSS is known as the JPSS Common Ground System (JPSS CGS). Developed and maintained by Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS), the CGS is a multi-mission enterprise system serving NOAA, NASA and their national and international partners. The CGS provides a wide range of support to a number of missions:

1) Command and control and mission management for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) mission today, expanding this support to the JPSS-1 satellite and the Polar Free Flyer mission in 2017

2) Data acquisition via a Polar Receptor Network (PRN) for S-NPP, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W1), POES, and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and Coriolis/WindSat for the Department of Defense (DoD)

3) Data routing over a global fiber Wide Area Network (WAN) for S-NPP, JPSS-1, Polar Free Flyer, GCOM-W1, POES, DMSP, Coriolis/WindSat, the NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN, which includes several Earth Observing System [EOS] missions), MetOp for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the National Science Foundation (NSF)

4) Environmental data processing and distribution for S-NPP, GCOM-W1 and JPSS-1

With this established infrastructure and existing suite of missions, the CGS is extensible to a wider array of potential new missions. This paper will describe the basic steps for adding a mission to the CGS, addressing the existing types of support defined above.