Airbus D&S awarded USAF Eagle Vision contract
Airbus Defence and Space (D&S) will perform work on the US Air Force’s (USAF’s) five Eagle Vision stations to reduce footprint and antenna dish size, and integrate new satellites. The company announced a contract for the work plus maintenance on 25 November.
Eagle Vision is a lightweight deployable, commercial satellite imagery downlink ground system. It provides the users with a combination of optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), medium and very high resolution capabilities supporting wartime operations, natural disaster relief operations and homeland defence preparations.
Under this contract Airbus D&S will undertake system evolution work to reduce the system’s footprint to transit cases versus the current shelter housing; introduce smaller antenna dishes, and enable the system to receive and process data from two new satellites, WorldView and Pleiades. The system currently receives imagery from SPOT 6/7, TerraSAR-X/Tandem-X constellations operated by Airbus D&S together with Radarsat and RapidEye.
Airbus will also perform sustainment work that includes 24/7 support, failure corrections with workaround solutions, spares management, preventive maintenance, training and support during deployments.
Eagle Vision is sponsored by the USAF ISR Innovations office at the Pentagon and the programme management office at Hanscom Air Force Base. Within the Department of Defense inventory, the systems are assigned to Ramstein Air Base (Germany), San Diego Air National Guard Station (California), McEntire Joint National Guard Base (South Carolina), Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (Hawaii) and Redstone Arsenal (Alabama).
The work will be performed until 2019.
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