Lockheed to maintain weather stations

The

Space and Missile Systems Centre has awarded

a contract to continue supporting its weather satellite receiving stations. If all options are exercised, the contract is valued at $47m over the next nine years.

The MARK IVB System is a recently redesigned global satellite weather system, capable of supporting the military forces beyond 2020 with all currently defined satellites. It provides for flash updated satellite changes and full system redundancy with significant growth opportunity as many more satellites are added to the world’s multi-national weather constellation.

‘This programme is a major component of readiness for the Global Information Grid as the global-distributed architecture allows low latency and high availability environmental and weather data to be available to the warfighter.’ said John Mengucci, president of Mission & Combat Support Solutions for Lockheed Martin’s Information Solutions & Global Services business area. Mengucci added that the architecture is currently being layered for inclusion into the US Air Force’s Global Command and Control System, making it the first weather system to be fully net-centric and machine-to-machine capable.

The MARK IVB system supplies data to all Coalition Operation’s Centres, every Air Expeditionary Force, every Air Expeditionary Wing, all Army Battalions Forward, all Navy Task Forces, all Marine Companies Forward, and every Marine Expeditionary Force.