NASA gave Raytheon Co. [RTN] a $29 million follow-on contract to help design air traffic management and other items in the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES).

This is a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract that begins today. The base contract lasts two years and has three one-year options.

Under the terms of the contract, the company will provide research support to the Airspace Systems Program of the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate for the design of advanced air traffic management concepts and software, and development and maintenance for the ACES system-wide modeling and simulation tool.

Principal objectives of this research are to enhance, extend and integrate the ACES high fidelity analyses and scenario development of Next Generation Air Transportation System air traffic management concepts and capabilities.

Work will be performed at the Raytheon facilities in Marlborough, Mass., at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and under subcontracts at the following locations: Aerospace Computing Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.; Intelligent Automation Inc. in Rockville, Md.; Mosaic ATM Inc. in Leesburg, Va.; PDA Associates in Wayland, Mass.; and Sensis Corp. in Campbell, Calif.