TEWKSBURY, Mass., Sept. 14, 2006 /PRNewswire/ -- Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has been awarded a $950,000 U.S. Air Force contract to demonstrate improvements to space situational awareness.

The program will significantly contribute to determining the approach for accomplishing the Air Force's mission of being able to identify, track and determine the behavior of all space objects in earth orbit. Under the contract, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) will conduct simulations to assess the information fusion technology and architecture and study the integration of this capability with available space surveillance and intelligence systems.

"This contract is an important step toward supporting our customer's need for greatly expanded tracking and identification of payloads launched by other countries," said Mary Petryszyn, vice president of Joint Battlespace Integration for IDS. "This is a mission area that is increasingly becoming more critical to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Congress. For our proposed solution we will be the systems integrators of core technologies needed to improve space situational awareness."

The Object Centric Intelligent Agents technology demonstrations, as the program is known, will be conducted at the Air Force Maui High Performance Computing Center through July 2008. The demonstration phase will validate a significant upgrade to the nation's space situational awareness capability and position Raytheon as the systems integrator for development.

Integrated Defense Systems is Raytheon's leader in Joint Battlespace Integration providing affordable, integrated solutions to a strong international and domestic customer base, including the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Armed Forces and the Department of Homeland Security.

Raytheon Company, with 2005 sales of $21.9 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 80,000 people worldwide.

  Contact:
  Guy Shields
  978.858.5246

SOURCE: Raytheon Company

CONTACT: Guy Shields of Raytheon Company, +1-978-858-5246

Web site: http://www.raytheon.com/