By John McHale

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - Northrop Grumman Space Technology in El Segundo, Calif., selected the SCS750 single-board computer from Maxwell Technologies Inc. in San Diego for spacecraft control and payload data management for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).

Northrop Grumman chose Maxwell’s SCS750 single-board computer over others because it could meet the integrator’s needs with one computer rather than several, says Larry Longden, Maxwell’s director of technology and marketing.

No government funding was associated with this collaboration. Northrop Grumman’s contract to Maxwell is worth as much as $14 million over the next seven years.

The Maxwell SCS750 (inset) will process data from the sensors of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).Click here to enlarge image

The $6 billion NPOESS, which will replace existing civilian and military weather satellites with one national system, will monitor short- and long-term weather patterns, the world’s oceans, and the space environment around Earth.

The first of six satellites is set for launch in 2009. Involved U.S. agencies include NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Defense.

Maxwell’s selection for a high-profile program such as NPOESS demonstrates the market need for boards that may not have the megarad resistance of BAE and Honeywell products but provide high performance and affordable costs for those applications that do not require megarad resistance, Longden says.

Each satellite will require six single-board computers to perform spacecraft control and data management. Longden says that Maxwell’s proprietary component-shielding technology and system-level architecture enable the SCS750 to withstand the effects of solar flares and other environmental radiation, ensuring reliable performance in space.

Maxwell’s SCS750 single-board computer for space has triple-redundant IBM PowerPC750FX processors running at 800 MHz and 1,800 million instructions per second. It has silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, and uses Actel RT-AX field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). For more information, visit www.maxwell.com.