SANTA BARBARA, Calif., (Oct. 10, 2002) — Raytheon Company will provide prime contractor TRW up to seven Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instruments for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).

Under the contract, Raytheon will continue to design, develop, test and deliver three VIIRS flight units. The contract includes options for four additional units through 2014.
The first Raytheon VIIRS instrument is scheduled for launch in 2006 on the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) spacecraft.

Current Raytheon VIIRS work is conducted under an engineering, manufacturing, and development contract awarded in November 2000 by the NPOESS Integrated Program Office.
Raytheon has successfully completed the VIIRS Critical Design Review milestone and is well on the way to meeting the NPP launch schedule.

NPOESS is the low-Earth orbiting polar satellite system designed to meet the nation’s future civilian science and military needs for accurate weather forecasting. NPOESS will replace the Department of Commerce’s Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) and the Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites. It will satisfy both civil and national security requirements for remotely sensed meteorological, oceanographic, climatic and space environmental data.

VIIRS will provide the meteorological data required to produce Environmental Data Records that includes imagery, sea surface temperature, low light imaging and ocean color.

Santa Barbara Remote Sensing, a division of Raytheon Company’s Space and Airborne Systems business, has more than 35 years history developing sophisticated multimission space sensors. Currently, Raytheon satellite payloads have logged more than 450 on-orbit years. Most recently, Raytheon’s second Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) entered Earth’s orbit on May 4 onboard the Aqua spacecraft, the next satellite in NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS).

With headquarters in Lexington, Mass., Raytheon Company is a global technology leader in defense, government and commercial electronics, and business and special mission aircraft.

###

Note to Editors: As part of the TRW NPOESS team, Raytheon will also provide the entire ground system for NPOESS system, including the Command, Control, Communications Segment (C3S) and the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS). Raytheon’s IDPS software architecture will deliver massive amounts of data to produce weather analyses and information products in support of forecasting, scientific research and tactical users. Raytheon’s C3 Segment manages the overall mission, including active operation and accounting of mission data, delivery of sensor data to the IDPS, and satellite command and control.

For more information, go to the following websites: www.raytheon.com and http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/viirs.html

Contact:
Pennington Way IV
310.647.9067 (Office)
310.200.3911 (Mobile)
pway@raytheon.com