Raytheon has secured a $240m contract with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center to continue supporting the Earth Observing Systems Data and Information System (EOSDIS).

Nasa-owned EOSIDS is a portal that hosts earth science data contributed by Nasa and international satellite missions.

The system archives earth science data and makes it available to the scientific community worldwide.

Through its innovation capabilities, Raytheon enhances user experience and manages increasing data sets for scientific applications.

Scope of work under the contract includes software maintenance and enhancement, applications to process and visualise data, and system and hardware evolution.

"Our support enables important research used to analyse climate data to better understand how to protect our planet."

Raytheon information, intelligence and services (IIS) president Dave Wajsgras said: "For more than twenty years Raytheon has partnered with Nasa Goddard on developing innovative earth science data solutions.

"Our support enables important research used to analyse climate data to better understand how to protect our planet."

Last year, EOSDIS processed 8,292 unique data set requests, two million distinct users, and 27.9TB of data per day that was distributed to end users.

The five-year EOSDIS evolution and development (EED-2) contract is the third awarded to Raytheon to maintain and improve data access and systems. The company had been originally selected in 1992.

Raytheon IIS mission modernisation and sustainment vice-president Todd Probert said: "The latest contract award demonstrates Raytheon’s ability to deliver innovation on a key data processing system that has grown exponentially to 9.1 petabytes of data."

In the early 1990s, the company supplied core data processing components for the EOSDIS, which was brought online in 2009.