Industry News: contracts (April 08)
Air Force Extends Weather Agency Contract With Northrop Grumman
Northrop Grumman Corp. has been awarded the U.S. Air Force Weather Agency Systems Engineering, Management and Sustainment 2 contract.
The $239 million contract, which includes a base year and four option years, will extend work support services Northrop Grumman has provided the Air Force since the program was launched in 2002.
The contract covers classified and unclassified Air Force weather systems, including the Space Weather Analysis and Forecast System, which delivers space weather forecasts for global U.S. Department of Defense space operations.
DARPA Awards F6 Contracts
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded funding to four contractor teams for the first phase of the Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange (System F6) space technology and demonstration program.
The four teams, led by Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., Northrop Grumman Space and Mission Systems Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp., have been awarded more than $38.5 million combined.
The program intends to demonstrate that a traditional, large, monolithic satellite can be replaced by a group of smaller, individually launched, wirelessly networked and cluster-flown spacecraft modules. The ultimate goal of the program is to launch a fractionated spacecraft system and demonstrate it in orbit in about four years.
L-3 To Supply Software For Johns Hopkins Physics Lab
L-3 Telemetry-West will supply software to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab for the Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission operations center.
L-3’s InControl software will be the test executive for bench-level testing and assembly, integration and test as well as support on-orbit operations.
Part of NASA’s Living With a Star program, the mission will help scientists understand and ultimately predict how solar energy affects populations of relativistic electrons and ions in the Earth’s radiation belts.
Tata Signs Agreement With China entercom
Tata Communications is expanding its global VPN service to China through a network to network interface agreement with China Enterprise Netcom Corp. Ltd.
Through this agreement, Tata Communications and China Entercom have interconnected their respective multi-protocol label switching infrastructures, allowing Tata Communications’ multi-national corporation customers VPN connectivity reach beyond the existing 120 cities in India and 19 major business centers across North America, Asia, and Europe to include 347 cities throughout China.