Nov 12 1999
From The Space Library
NASA's Office of Earth Science Enterprise selected Ball Aerospace of Boulder, Colorado, and Aerojet General Corporation of Azusa, California, to study the next-generation, spaceborne, microwave, atmospheric instrument for weather-forecasting and climate-change research, awarding each company a one-year, US$4 million, fixed-price contract through Goddard Space Flight Center. The new instrument, the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), was one-third the size and weight of existing microwave-sounding instruments on board the Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) and the Earth Observing System-PM spacecraft. The application of new technologies, particularly in microwave electronics, had made the significantly smaller size of the ATMS possible. NASA intended to fly the first ATMS unit on the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environment Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) mission, a joint effort between NASA and the NPOESS Program Office. NPOESS, a tri-agency program consisting of parts of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Air Force, merged civilian and military polar-orbiting weather satellite systems into a single system.
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