Exelis Wins South Korea Weather Imager Contract; Rob Mitrevski Comments

ITT Exelis has won a multimillion dollar contract to supply South Korea with a new meteorological imager the country will use to forecast, detect and track typhoons.

The company will deliver the geostationary weather imager to South Korea under the GEO-KOMPSAT-2A program and is targeting a target launch date of 2017, Exelis said Monday.

According to the company, its Advanced Meteorological Imager provides users multiple spectral bands and two times the resolution of South Korea’s current systems to about half a mile.

“Recent hurricanes and major storms have shown the critical role played by geoimagers here in the United States,” said Rob Mitrevski, a vice president in Exelis’ geospatial systems business.

“South Korea similarly has challenges with typhoons and other severe weather,” added Mitrevski, who also serves as head of environmental intelligence and integrated geospatial sensors and systems.

The AMI is similar to Exelis’ Advanced Baseline Imager, which it is contracted to deliver to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA under the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite program.

The South Korea geoimager brings Exelis’ amount of orders for ABI class instruments to seven.