From the Editors
The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) certainly ranks among the most successful and long-running programs in the history of national security space. This constellation of polar-orbiting satellites helped spur the development of sophisticated remote-sensing instruments and data-processing systems. Its transition to civilian oversight helped bring these remarkable capabilities to diverse sectors ranging from shipping and agriculture to disaster prevention. The convergence of military and civilian polar-orbiting satellite programs, which will culminate in the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), will usher in a new era in global meteorological science. Similarly, the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) will bring significant enhancements in the quality and timeliness of satellite imagery and environmental data products.
Aerospace support to these programs spans several decades and cuts across numerous disciplines, from information architecture to instrument concept studies to postlaunch verification of onboard sensors. Future systems will generate significantly more raw sensor data, and making full use of this data will be no simple task. With Aerospace assistance, mission planners are determining the optimal means of collecting, transmitting, analyzing, categorizing, packaging, and archiving this unprecedented volume of data. Aerospace's impartial engineering assessments, combined with specialized expertise in bandwidth-efficient communications, architecture development, distributed computing, ground-system infrastructure, enterprise resource management, and similar technologies, have helped provide a sound basis for making critical program decisions.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the primary agency in charge of U.S. weather satellites. Aerospace has been helping NOAA as it repositions itself to better manage the next generation of meteorological and environmental sensing systems. Part of this effort has focused on organizational and architectural concepts, while other aspects have focused on risk reduction and technology demonstrations such as the NPOESS Preparatory Project and the GOES-R communications testbed. Similarly, Aerospace support to the Near Real Time Processing Effort helped NASA make data collected by the Earth Observing System satellites more useful to NOAA and other operational weather agencies.
This issue of Crosslink takes a close look at some of the forces shaping the future of meteorological and environmental satellite systems. We also introduce a new feature, Research Horizons, highlighting some of the cutting edge work being done under the auspices of the Aerospace independent R&D program.
