...forthcoming research and development opportunities for new environmental weather sensing capabilities. On April 25th, Colonel Scott Larrimore, director of the Defense Weather Systems Directorate at the Space and Missile Systems Center, hosted 39 companies to share information regarding risk reduction investment opportunities to enable affordable, flexible and resilient space based weather systems.

Air Force areas of investment include Atmospheric Sounding/Microwave and Electro-Optical/Infrared sensor technologies, as well as System and Spacecraft architecture concepts. These efforts will position SMC to deliver efficient and responsive capabilities to support future operations, provide flexibility in the future architectures, drive down overall development cost, risk, and schedule, capitalize on innovations, increase resiliency, and invigorate the industrial base. “These investments offer the opportunity to greatly reduce the cost and time to deploy next generation weather sensors essential to our military forces and integral to our way of war,” said Colonel Larrimore.

The mission of DWSD is to develop, acquire, field and sustain affordable space and terrestrial weather systems to meet Department of Defense requirements. The directorate fields the Air Force’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program constellation of satellites, space weather sensors, and other weather capabilities to support operational forecaster needs. With two spacecraft left to launch, the DMSP celebrates its 50th anniversary of operational success later this year.