McMurdo, the emergency readiness and response division of Orolia, was selected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide support services for its next-generation search-and-rescue satellite-aided systems.
The contract, which will cover NOAA Medium Earth Orbit Search and Rescue systems in Hawaii and Florida, has a contract ceiling value of $8.2 million over five years, with about $1.6 million expected for 2016.
“McMurdo is pleased to continue our strong partnership with NOAA, and this new contract is further validation that together we will shape the future of the U.S. search-and-rescue industry in the years to come,” Orolia CEO Jean-Yves Courtois said in a statement.
NOAA, the government agency responsible for the U.S. SARSAT program, installed the world’s first operational MEOSAR system in Hawaii in 2011 and there was an additional MEOSAR installation in Florida in 2014. McMurdo designed, developed and installed both systems.
McMurdo said MEOSAR is the next-generation version of the Cospas-Sarsat international search-and-rescue satellite system that has helped to save more than 40,000 lives since 1982.
“We have trusted McMurdo from the very beginning to provide the technologies, expertise and support that are critical to our MEOSAR search-and-rescue operations,” said Mickey Fitzmaurice, the U.S. NOAA SARSAT program’s lead satellite systems engineer. “The McMurdo MEOSAR systems are improving the location detection timeliness and accuracy, resulting in faster search-and-rescue response times and even more lives saved.”
This post originally appeared in Trade Only Today and can be found here.
