Emergent Joins GOES-R Team
Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. (Emergent) is part of a team headed
by prime contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colorado (http://www.lockheedmartin.com)
which was awarded a contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) to perform preliminary design and risk reduction
(PDRR) activities for the GOES-R satellite.
The Lockheed Martin GOES-R team brings together the best assets
available from its organization and throughout industry and academia to
provide broad and deep domain expertise and key enabling technologies.
It includes Emergent, ARES Corporation, ASRC Aerospace Corporation,
Global Science & Technology, Honeywell, IBM, Intelsat, ItriCorp,
Kamel Engineering Services, Pennsylvania State University, RS
Information Systems, and SAIC.
The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) program is
part of NOAA’s weather observation operations. The GOES-R series of
GOES spacecraft (https://osd.goes.noaa.gov/)
will incorporate improved satellite and instrument technologies for
more timely and accurate weather forecasts and to improve the detection
and observations of meteorological phenomena such as hurricanes.
Emergent’s role on the Lockheed Martin GOES-R PDRR team is to focus on
the viability of GPS to meet the GOES-R orbit accuracy requirements in
real time. It includes GPS receiver and timing reference specification,
error budget, hardware survey, performance simulation, and GPS-at-GEO
performance analysis.
GPS-based navigation in space offers significant improvements in orbit
accuracy, and is an enabler for real-time orbit determination. It has
long been proven in low Earth orbit, but is just now being demonstrated
for highly elliptical and geosynchronous orbits, where the spacecraft
altitude can be above that of the GPS constellation. GPS-based
navigation for GOES-R promises dramatic improvements in orbit accuracy
and reductions in operations cost and complexity.
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