[SatNews] NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center awards the Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) a five year contract valued at up to $240 million to continue its support of the Earth Observing Systems Data and Information System (EOSDIS).  This system ingests, archives and makes Earth science data available to the scientific community worldwide. The latest EOSDIS Evolution and Development (EED-2) contract is the third competitively awarded contract Raytheon has received to maintain, operate and develop improvements for data access and system performance. The initial contract award was in 1992.

"For more than twenty years Raytheon has partnered with NASA Goddard on developing innovative Earth science data solutions," said Dave Wajsgras, President of Raytheon Information, Intelligence and Services. "Our support enables important research used to analyze climate data to better understand how to protect our planet." 

EOSIDS is NASA's portal for Earth science data provided by both NASA and upcoming international satellite missions. Raytheon's continuous innovation allows for improving user experience while managing data sets that are growing exponentially. In fiscal year 2014, the Raytheon-backed EOSDIS managed: 

8,292 unique data set requests 

2 million distinct users 

27.9 terabytes per day of data distributed to end users

Under this contract, Raytheon will continue to proactively make improvements that enable more integrated data access and data sets for science applications. Specific work includes software maintenance and enhancement, development of applications to process and visualize data, and system and hardware evolution.  

"Raytheon is tasked with making all of NASA's Earth science data available online for scientists and researchers around the world," said Todd Probert, vice president for Mission Modernization and sustainment for Raytheon IIS. "The latest contract award demonstrates Raytheon's ability to deliver innovation on a key data processing system that has grown exponentially to 9.1 petabytes of data. Our focus is on making an enormous amount of data—the equivalent of 910 copies of Wikipedia—available to researchers any time so they can continue their important work."

Raytheon started work on EOSDIS in the early 1990's, delivering the system's core data processing components. EOSDIS was brought online in 2009 at, allowing direct user access and dramatically reducing access times and data management burdens.