Northrop Grumman has received a contract from the U.S. Air Force for offering research and development for the modular architecture for signal-processing, tracking and exploitation research (MASTER) campaign. The value of this contract is $5.75 million.
The Development Planning Directorate of the Space and Missile System Center of California gave this contract to the company.
This MASTER program has assisted the ground processing effort of the government for the commercially hosted IR payload (CHIRP) campaign’s on-orbit phase of the Air Force. A CHIRP sensor is present on a SES satellite that is functioning in geosynchronous orbit over the US.
The director of Northrop Grumman, Ron Alford, stated that the MASTER program has offered the clients, a significant sensor-agnostic ground processing potential. An enterprise approach is employed in the architecture with plug-and-play parts and an open architecture. Data processing systems can be utilized through the MASTER architecture for offering normal processing potential across the types of sensor and system constellations, which does not warrant personalized processing chains.
The MASTER program’s enterprise architecture can be utilized by several sensor types without the unnecessary cost for redeveloping the software of ground mission processing. Currently, it is modeled against overhead persistent infrared (OPIR) sensors.
MASTER incorporates and utilizes algorithms obtained from third parties, and new experimental simulated information and processing information from several operational OPIR sensors.
The Alternative Infrared Satellite System campaign that commenced during 2006 has resulted in this MASTER contract. The focus of this MASTER is on developing a plug-and-play, open architecture for sensor-agnostic processing for the government in order to assess testing the complete earth-staring array sensors.
Source: https://www.northropgrumman.com/