The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) advanced in successful compatibility testing for the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP).

Raytheon Co. [RTN] announced.

Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC] and the NPOESS Integrated Program Office conducted the work.

The NASA-led spacecraft compatibility testing exercise was a significant achievement in paving the way for a successful NPP launch, Raytheon stated. The test was the first opportunity to exercise the two NPOESS-provided NPP ground segments with the NPP flight spacecraft.

It included building, scheduling and up-linking instrument loads, managing the spacecraft in a fully automated mode, and verifying ground system and operational products.

All commanding of the satellite was done by Northrop-Raytheon operations and support personnel, who will operate NPP on orbit.

The NPP compatibility test used the NPP flight spacecraft, synthetically generated science data, spacecraft diagnostic and telemetry data collected from the spacecraft, and three of its key sensors: the flight Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder, the Engineering Development Unit (EDU) Cross-track Infrared Sounder and the EDU Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite.

The next scheduled command and telemetry testing will be early next year after the integration of the next three flight instruments to the NPP spacecraft. A full ground compatibility test, planned for summer, will consist of flowing pre-recorded satellite data through the ground station of the command, control and communications segment and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) long-term data archiving system. At the same time, it will test a 72-hour continuous mission operations exercise and mission management functions.

Raytheon is part of prime contractor Northrop Grumman’s NPOESS team. NPOESS is a satellite system that will be used to monitor global environmental conditions and collect and disseminate data related to weather, atmosphere, oceans, land and near-space environments.

Raytheon routed the data gathered during the test, using the NPP ground system, from the ground station in Svalbard, Norway, sending it through a NASA-NOAA wide area network at 40Mbps across the Baltic Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility (NSOF) in Suitland, Md. At NSOF the data was processed into raw data records using a factory-released version of the NPOESS interface data processing segment. This exercise simulated the transmission of mission data as it will be collected, stored on the spacecraft, transmitted and processed during the NPP mission.