The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded the Raytheon Company a multi-million dollar contract to continue its support for a data processing system that is used to ingest, archive and provide earth science data to scientists around the world.

The space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center gave the U.S.-based defense contractor a five-year contract estimated at $240 million to continue its operation of the Earth Observing Systems Data and Information System (EOSDIS), which serves as a portal for research data used for the planning of upcoming NASA and international satellite projects.

The recent EOSDIS Evolution and Development (EED-2) agreement is the third such competitive contract awarded to Raytheon that involves the maintenance, operation and development of improvements for system performance and data access. The first contract was awarded back in 1992.

Dave Wajsgras, Raytheon's president of information, intelligence and services, said Raytheon has worked with NASA's Goddard team for over 20 years to develop innovative solutions to earth science data.

He said that the company's support allows access to key research that can be used in analyzing climate data needed to help protect the planet.

In 2014, Raytheon's support of the EOSDIS managed 2 million distinct users of the system, 8,292 requests for unique data sets and around 27.9 terabytes of data distributed to users every day.

As part of its contract with NASA, the company will continue to develop innovations that will allow more data sets and integrated data access for different science applications. These include the maintenance and enhancement of software, the creation of applications designed to visualize and process data and the evolution of the system and its hardware.

Todd Probert, Raytheon's vice president of mission modernization and sustainment, explained that Raytheon's task is to provide online access to NASA's earth science data for researchers and scientists in different parts of the world.

Probert said that the latest EOSDIS contract demonstrates the company's ability to develop innovations on an important data processing system that has improved significantly to 9.1 petabytes worth of data. He added that Raytheon is focused on providing an immense amount of data to scientists at any time so that they can proceed with their research work.

Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | Flickr