NCI has been awarded a task order from the Army National Guard (ARNG) and Air National Guard (ANG) worth an estimated $173 million under the ITES-2S contract, if all options are exercised. The award of the competitive task order continues and expands NCI’s role with these clients. The period of performance covered by this new task order is for a 10 month base period and options that will extend to September 2015.

Under this task order, NCI is responsible for managing all IT and telecommunications equipment and systems operating in the ARNG and ANG National Capital Region environment as well as supporting end-users of this equipment. Services to be provided under this contract include:

• Data communication
• Voice communication
• Security management
• Email
• Web services
• Active directory
• Other back office support
• Server and desktop support
• Video and audio conferencing engineering support
• Information technology services.

“We are very pleased and honored to have been chosen by the ARNG and ANG to provide their information technology support services. Our association with these important customers is extremely important to our company and we look forward to a strong partnership in supporting both the ARNG and ANG to meet their vital missions,” stated Charles Narang, NCI Chairman and CEO.

AECOM Technology Corporation, a provider of professional technical and management support services for government and commercial clients, announced this week that it has won its first three task orders for Contract Field Teams (CFT), which are valued at $163 million.

The CFT contract is an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with the U.S Air Force to support the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Under the first task order, AECOM will support the U.S. Navy F-18 Fighters – both the Legacy Hornet as well as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet – in Lemoore, Calif. Under the other two task orders, AECOM will support operations at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, N.C., and the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, Ga.

The CFT program, which has a maximum value of $10.12 billion over a seven-year period of performance, provides major and minor inspections, maintenance, modifications and repairs of aircraft and ground vehicles at government locations around the world.

It looks like it’s a great holiday season for BAE Systems who has received Level 5 certification against the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). This is the highest level rating that an engineering organization can achieve. The designation was awarded after an independent two-week investigation led by the Systems and Software Productivity Consortium which involved in-depth interviews and document reviews.

“This is a great achievement; CMMI Level 5 is an indicator of how our process improvements compare to our competitors and has been a factor in our ability to win contracts over the last several years,” said Ann Hennon, director of Core Process and Training for Ground Systems. “Achieving and maintaining this rating lets our customers know that they can count on us to provide the products and services they expect.”

More than 100 Ground Systems employees from three different sites – Santa Clara, California; Orlando, Florida; and York, Pennsylvania – in 10 different functional areas from Engineering and Project Management – were surveyed. As part of this process, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now requires validation of the results certified by the appraisal team, thus raising the bar of the appraisal process. In all, more than 2000 artifacts such as drawings, designs, documents and video were reviewed.

CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. CMMI helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes.

A rating of CMMI Level 5 requires Ground Systems to have and follow a defined set of processes, evaluate implementation of those processes and seek ways to improve the company’s methods used to develop and build products.

“We are continually seeking ways to improve our ability to develop products for our customers,” Hennon continued. “Our focus over the last couple of years has been expanding industry best practices across all engineering functions and development sites within Ground Systems. Achieving a rating of CMMI Level 5 is a clear indication the organization is implementing those best practices.”

The Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, is known for conducting routine conjunction assessment for 24 NASA satellites, including NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s (GSFC) Earth Science Constellation (ESC). The Chinese anti-satellite test (ASAT) in early 2007 generated a massive amount of space debris in orbits similar to ESC missions. “Within 30 days of the ASAT test, every member of the ESC had debris from the destroyed satellite approach within 25 kilometers,” says David McKinley, an a.i. solutions project engineer for GSFC’s Conjunction Assessment Team. By June 2007, the first ESC risk mitigation maneuver as a direct result of the Chinese debris was performed by the Terra spacecraft, confirming that the Fengyun-1C break-up was having significant operational impacts on the ESC member missions.

Now, nearly two years later, the debris has not decayed significantly, accounting for nearly 15% of all conjunctions in the ESC, says McKinley. NASA wanted to assess the long-term operational impacts to ESC missions—over the next twenty years or even 100 years into the future. Such long-term intensive analyzes meant creating high fidelity orbit propagations of the several thousand pieces of debris for decades into the future—a huge analysis problem requiring enormous amounts of computing power and months to complete. GSFC wanted results sooner.

a.i. solutions configured its commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) FreeFlyer to perform in a clustered, high performance computing (HPC) environment. Using Microsoft^® Windows HPC solutions, FreeFlyer and 10 clustered computers; the 20-year analysis was completed in less than 3 days. The end result shows that the Fengyun debris continues to remain a threat to the ESC member missions in the near future. In fact, the number of conjunction threats the ESC missions experience is predicted to triple by the year 2027. Further analysis shows that even after 100 years, over 20% of the ASAT debris could still be in orbit. a.i. solutions has several white papers on the analysis available for download from their website.