Parsons Takes Over 3 NOAA Satellites’ Operations Under GSaaS Contract

Parsons Corporation’s Colorado Springs facility has taken over full operations of three spacecraft of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellites fleet under a ground station-as-a-service contract. 

NOAA’s satellite operations facility in Suitland, Maryland, transitioned the operations to Parsons in a one-year process, according to NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service. 

Dubbed POES Extended Life, the new cloud-based commercial engineering services contract was awarded to Parsons in September 2022 and is designed to continue operating NOAA’s older satellites, NESDIS said Wednesday. 

NOAA’s GSaaS architecture approach was based on the results of several market studies, including the agency’s Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Microsoft Azure Orbital in 2021. The research analyses showed that the GSaaS approach offers an innovative, cost-effective POES mission, NESDIS pointed out.

The data that Parsons now delivers from the satellites enables NESDIS support to NOAA’s climate models, weather forecasts and environmental monitoring. A team of private companies supports Parsons’ POES contract, which will be active until September 2025.

Tim Walsh, director of NOAA’s Office of Low Earth Orbit Observations, said the POES Extended Life GSaaS provides a platform for future low-Earth orbit missions, such as the Near Earth Orbit Network program and the upcoming Quicksounder mission.

NOAA’s leveraging commercial services also manifested in April when it awarded a potential eight-year, $399.3 million contract to Peraton for the operation and maintenance of a ground network coordinating polar-orbiting satellites