The weather instruments — Fort Wayne's eyes in orbit

1978 – TODAY

The largest technology story in this record: Every day's American weather forecast rests in part on instruments designed and built in Fort Wayne. L3Harris's own Indiana fact sheet states the span: the company's Fort Wayne technology "has been on every National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellite in low-Earth orbit since 1978 and in geostationary orbit since 1994." The claim is the company's, and the instrument record behind it is a matter of government documentation, instrument by instrument.

The polar line: The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer — AVHRR, the imager that flew on the TIROS-N and NOAA polar satellites from 1978 and became the workhorse of global cloud, sea-surface and vegetation observation — "is manufactured by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) of Fort Wayne, Indiana," NOAA's own calibration system description states; the instruments were tested in ITT's space chamber in Fort Wayne, and the third-generation AVHRR/3 and the HIRS/4 infrared sounder were likewise manufactured by ITT Exelis in Fort Wayne under contract to NASA, as the European weather agency's instrument pages record. The line's modern heir is the Cross-track Infrared Sounder, CrIS, the high-spectral-resolution spectrometer on the Suomi NPP and Joint Polar Satellite System satellites: "developed by ITT Exelis, Fort Wayne, Indiana," in the JPSS programme's own instrument account.

The geostationary line: ITT built the imagers and sounders for every NOAA geostationary satellite from 1990 forward, the company announced at the GOES-P launch in 2010 — its Geospatial Systems team in Fort Wayne designed and built that satellite's imager and sounder. The generation that followed is the Advanced Baseline Imager, the sixteen-channel camera of the GOES-R series: "ABI was built by Harris Corp. of Fort Wayne, Indiana," Spaceflight Now reported at GOES-16's launch preparations, and NOAA's own launch coverage states it was "developed and built by Exelis in Ft. Wayne, Indiana." The same Fort Wayne design, adapted as the Advanced Himawari Imager, flies on Japan's Himawari weather satellites. The successor instrument for NOAA's GeoXO constellation passed its system Critical Design Review in 2025, L3Harris records, readying the Fort Wayne line for a fifth decade.

The missile-warning turn, and the site today: The infrared craft behind the weather instruments is now also aimed at missile defence. In April 2025 L3Harris completed a $125 million expansion of its Fort Wayne site — tripling its manufacturing and testing space, to a capacity of up to 48 payloads a year — to produce infrared sensor payloads for missile-warning and missile-defence programmes, including the Space Development Agency's Tracking Layer. The company's Indiana fact sheet (August 2026) counts 630 Indiana employees, 340 of them engineers and scientists. One boundary is worth printing: the celebrated commercial Earth-imaging cameras of the WorldView satellites, though built by the same corporate family in the Exelis years, were supplied by its Rochester, New York operation — not Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne's space specialty is the weather and infrared line, and it is enough.

Sources:

1. NOAA Technical Report NESDIS 77, NOAA Polar Satellite Calibration: A System Description (1994) — "The AVHRR instrument is manufactured by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) of Fort Wayne, Indiana."
2. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, HgCdTe Detector Responsivity and GOES Instrument Calibration (1993, rev. 2000) — the AVHRR instruments tested at the ITT space chamber in Ft. Wayne, IN.
3. EUMETSAT, Metop instrument pages — AVHRR and HIRS/4 "manufactured by ITT Exelis in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA under contract to NASA"; eoPortal, NOAA POES series — AVHRR/3 built by ITT Aerospace of Fort Wayne, IN.
4. Joint Polar Satellite System instrument accounts — the Cross-track Infrared Sounder "developed by ITT Exelis, Fort Wayne, Indiana."
5. ITT Corporation, news release, 5 March 2010 — the Geospatial Systems team in Fort Wayne designed and built the GOES-P imager and sounder; ITT built the imagers and sounders for all NOAA geostationary satellites since 1990.
6. Spaceflight Now, 16 November 2016 and 23 January 2017 — "ABI was built by Harris Corp. of Fort Wayne, Indiana"; the related cameras on the Japanese weather satellites also built by Harris; FOX Weather / NOAA launch coverage — ABI "developed and built by Exelis in Ft. Wayne, Indiana."
7. L3Harris Technologies — Indiana fact sheet (August 2026): the on-every-NOAA-satellite claim since 1978 and 1994; the GeoXO imager's 2025 Critical Design Review; the April 2025 expansion; 630 Indiana employees, 340 engineers and scientists; and the 31 July 2025 Fort Wayne facility tour release — the $125 million expansion, the tripled space, the 48-payload capacity, the SDA Tracking Layer work.
8. eoPortal, WorldView-3 — the imaging system supplied by Exelis Geospatial Systems of Rochester, N.Y. (the boundary case).