LOS ANGELES AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- The Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center has awarded General Atomics, Electromagnetic Systems Group (GA-EMS) a firm-fixed-price delivery order under the Hosted Payload Solutions (HoPS) Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract for commercially hosting the Argos Advanced Data Collection System (A-DCS). Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the total value of the contract is $37,906,872.
Under the contract, General Atomics maintains and manages the configuration of all design interface information between the satellite platform and hosted payload(s). The work will be performed in Englewood, Colorado. The period of performance for the payload/satellite integration and test is three years with an additional five years of on-orbit operational support.
“With this first HoPS Mission DO award, this contract embodies SMC 2.0 by reducing traditional acquisition lead times and taking advantage of hosted payload opportunities in the commercial marketplace,” said Col. Timothy Sejba, director of SMC’s Advanced Systems and Development Directorate. “Additionally, this award highlights the strong partnership between SMC, NOAA and our international partners.”
An international program, the Argos data collection system’s mission is supported by NOAA via the Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) program. POES collects data from Argos transmitters worldwide. There are tens of thousands of these transmitters used to track drifting ocean buoys, wildlife, commercial fisheries and piracy as well as a limited number of non-environmental or oceanic uses, such as homeland security.
Argos A-DCS is expected to launch into sun-synchronous low earth orbit in 2021.