Satellite Deals Of The Day

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Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin [LMT] won a $6 million, 18-month contract from NASA to perform design-and-risk reduction for the agency’s Solar Imaging Suite (SIS), a set of operational instruments that will fly on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R Series. That series of satellites will provide key information on solar activity and the effects of the Sun on the Earth and the near-Earth space environment. The first GOES-R is scheduled for launch during 2012. The GOES Program is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which establishes requirements, provides funding and distributes environmental data for the United States. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., procures and manages the acquisition of the GOES satellites for NOAA.
Montreal, Canada-based PolarSat, a privately held Canadian company that develops and manufactures satellite communications equipment, received an initial contract worth $12 million from China Aviation Supplies International Tendering Co. Ltd. to provide and install equipment for a VSATPlus II satellite communications system. The end user of the network would be the Air Traffic Management Bureau, a division of General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC). The procurement of commercial VSAT equipment is expected to grow beyond $12 million. The VSATPlus II network will connect the government agency’s headquarters and regional offices in a full mesh network. All sites will support a complex mix of voice and data communications.