Orbital ATK (NYSE: OA) has received a potential five-year, $129.9 million contract from NASA to design and develop a satellite that works to provide images and measurements of the Earth’s land cover.
NASA awarded the firm-fixed-price delivery order for the Landsat 9 spacecraft under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition III contract, the space agency said Wednesday.
The contract also covers the integration of two government-furnished equipment, in-orbit satellite checkout, satellite-level tests and mission operations support.
Work will occur at Orbital ATK™s facilities in Arizona and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Landsat 9 is part of the Sustainable Land Imaging program, a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that seeks to build and run a space-based system designed to provide land-imaging measurements to researchers.
Orbital ATK said Tuesday USGS will operate the land surface mapping satellite that is set for launch in December 2020.
œLandsat represents over four decades of imagery, providing valuable data for agriculture, global change research, emergency response, and disaster relief, Steve Krein, vice president of science and environmental programs at Orbital ATK.
Landsat 9 is based on the Orbital ATK-built LEOStar-3, a low-Earth-orbit spacecraft that launched aboard NASA™s Swift and Fermi Gamma-ray astrophysics observatories and Landsat 8 satellite.
Orbital ATK also built Landsat 4, 5 and 8 satellites for NASA.
