NASA selected The Hammers Company to build the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) Mission Operations Element (MOE).

A five-year contract, with a cost-plus-award-fee portion that commences upon contract award through final post-launch acceptance; and a cost-plus-fixed-fee period that is scheduled to commence after the tentatively scheduled launch date of July 2011, has been awarded to The Hammers Company for $14.9 million.

The company will be responsible for the design, development, integration, testing, delivery, and installation of the MOE; support for ground system and mission-level integration and test; support of operations readiness activities; engineering support during the launch and early-orbit period; and a period of sustaining engineering.

Funding for the MOE is provided to NASA on a reimbursable basis by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) of the Department of Interior. LDCM is a component of the Landsat Program conducted jointly by NASA and the USGS.

NASA is responsible for providing the LDCM spacecraft, the instruments, the launch vehicle, and the mission operations element of the ground system. USGS is providing the mission operations center and ground processing systems, as well as the flight operations team.

LDCM continues the Landsat programmatic goals outlined by Congress in the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 (P.L. 102-555), which is to provide data into the future that is sufficiently consistent with previous Landsat data to allow the detection and quantitative characterization of changes in or on the land surface of the globe.

LDCM was conceived as a follow-on mission to the Landsat series of missions that have provided coverage of the Earth's continental surfaces since 1972.