Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) Ground System Performance

The NOAA-NASA jointly-acquired Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) will replace the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES). The ground system, known as the ‘Common Ground System (CGS)’, and developed by Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS) provides command, control, and communications (C3) and data processing and product delivery. The CGS currently flies the Suomi NPP satellite and routes mission data to U.S. ground facilities, where it processes the data into mission products and provides them to US weather centrals. Full volume data traffic is now flowing from the satellite through CGS’s C3, data processing, and data delivery systems. Ground system performance is critical for this operational system. As part of early system checkout, Raytheon measured all aspects of data acquisition, routing, processing, and delivery to ensure operational performance requirements are met, and will continue to be met throughout the mission. Two key metrics relating to the most important operational measures, availability and latency for Raw Data Records (RDRs), SDRs, and EDRs are discussed.