ATLAS Utqiagvik, Alaska 3.7m antenna at 71°N – North America’s highest latitude ground station. (Photo: Business Wire)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) awarded Atlas Space Operations a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for ground station as a service. Atlas announced the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract on July 13. 

Atlas has supported NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) missions since 2017. In that time, Atlas reports that it has completed 52,000 passes for NOAA with more than 98% availability, with low latency of under 26 seconds.

The company will continue to provide data delivery for three NOAA missions which focus on climate research, using its Freedom software and global antenna network. The NOAA missions will continue to employ ATLAS ground stations located in Finland, Ghana, and Tahiti. The Atlas software backhauls mission data from all sites to the cloud, processes the data using customer-specific applications, and pushes data to NOAA servers.

“Our latest agreement with NOAA represents a three-tiered victory for ATLAS. It reinforces the reliability of our global ground network, demonstrates the adaptability of our Freedom software, and most importantly it is a testament to our outstanding client service experience,” said Atlas CEO Sean McDaniel.