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Raytheon’s Meteorological Imager Now Providing Images From Japanese Weather Satellite

EL SEGUNDO, CA, March 30, 2005/Satnews Daily/ ¾ Raytheon Co.’s Japanese Advanced Meteorological Imager has been successfully launched on board Japan's Multi-functional Transport Satellite-1 Replacement (MTSAT-1R), built by prime contractor, Space Systems/Loral (SS/L), and is now providing new images of earth.

Raytheon said JAMI introduces the next generation of operational GEO (Geosynchronous Earth Orbit) weather imagers and provides enhanced spatial sampling, radiometric sensitivity, Earth coverage and 24-hour observation capability.

The JAMI subsystem was developed and produced by the Santa Barbara Remote Sensing division of Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems business and was provided to prime contractor Space Systems Loral for the Japanese MTSAT-1R satellite in June 2003.

According to Raytheon, MTSAT fulfills a meteorological mission by providing timely, high quality, full-disk multispectral imagery for operational weather needs in Japan, East Asia and Australia, along with a civil aviation mission by relaying digitized voice data and other data for aircraft along with radio navigation signals.

"JAMI was successfully produced on an extremely challenging schedule, and we're proud to see it now being deployed," said Ron Ambort, general manager of Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. "Our imager is characterized by an elegant architecture and the use of newer technology for design simplicity and superior performance."

JAMI breaks through limitations of earlier geosynchronous weather imagers with significant improvements in many areas, including unprecedented spatial resolution, radiometric sensitivity and calibration.

Raytheon said JAMI will transmit 2-km infrared data in normal operating modes and can provide 0.5-km visible band data on demand. Higher spatial resolution data improves cloud edge detection and tracking, which results in more accurate wind drift information, improved capability to describe and forecast behavior of rapidly evolving weather systems, and improved typhoon tracking. JAMI will also enable identification of smaller scale phenomena such as fog, cloud-top thermal gradients, and outflow boundaries.