Landsat spacecraft contract awarded by NASA to Orbital ATK
NewsOctober 30, 2016
WASHINGTON. NASA officials awarded a delivery order under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition III (Rapid III) contract to Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia, known publicly as Orbital ATK, for the purchase of Landsat 9 spacecraft in the amount of $129.9 million under a five-year, firm fixed-price delivery order.
Orbital engineers will design and fabricate the spacecraft, integrate the mission’s two government-furnished instruments, and perform satellite-level testing, in-orbit satellite checkout, and mission operations support. The work will be done at the contractor’s facilities and at the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The spacecraft will extend the Landsat program’s record of land images to 50 years. Landsat has provided, 98-foot (30-meter) resolution, multi-spectral, global measurements of Earth’s land cover since 1972, building a freely available archive of more than six million satellite images. With data from Landsat satellites, ecologists have tracked deforestation in South America, water managers have monitored irrigation of farmland in the American West, and researchers have watched the growth of cities worldwide, according to NASA.
Landsat 9 is a key part of the U.S. multi-satellite, multi-decadal, Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) program, according to NASA. SLI is a NASA-U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) partnership to develop, launch, and operate a spaceborne system that will enable researchers and other users to have high-quality, global, continuous land-imaging measurements. These data are compatible with the 44-year Landsat record and will evolve through introduction of new sensor and system technologies.
NASA will build, launch, and perform the initial check-out and commissioning of the satellite while USGS will operate Landsat 9 and process, archive, and freely distribute the mission’s data.
For more information, visit www.nasa.gov.
