HUGHES SPACE AND COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY Communications and Customer Relations P.O. Box 92919 (S10/S323) Los Angeles, CA 90009 (310) 364-6363 www.hughespace.com

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 6, 1997 -- Hughes Space and Communications Company (HSC) received a three-year, $32 million contract last week to develop a microwave imager/sounder that will be used in an upcoming U.S. defense-civilian meteorological satellite program.

"This award gets us back into the weather satellite arena," said Donald L. Cromer, HSC president. "We have years of experience in meteorological spacecraft and instruments, and have been seeking opportunities to get back into this field. We see it as a solid addition to our government space business mix."

The new instrument is called the conical scanning microwave imager/sounder (CMIS). It is for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), which would be available for first launch in 2007. CMIS will be the first microwave imager to be carried on a U.S. civil weather satellite. The imager portion will penetrate clouds to measure rain rate, wind speed and direction over the ocean, amount of water in clouds, and soil moisture. The sounder will take temperature and humidity profiles of the atmosphere.

Hughes leads one of two teams that received CMIS development contracts. The teams will conduct systems studies and build engineering models of some critical hardware elements to reduce risk when flight hardware manufacturing begins. Downselect to one team is scheduled for the year 2000.

The CMIS contract was awarded July 30 by the NPOESS Integrated Program Office, which for the first time combines the low-earth-orbit weather observation requirements of the Department of Defense, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

HSC's team includes Hughes STX of Lanham, Md.; Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), Inc., of Cambridge, Mass.; millitech <cq small m> of South Deerfield, Mass.; and Raytheon E-Systems of St. Petersburg, Fla.

The CMIS instrument is HSC's third-generation microwave sensor project. The Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I), built for the U.S. Air Force's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, was the first. It was followed by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Microwave Imager (TMI), built for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. That will be launched late this year in a U.S.-Japanese program.

"Our first SSM/I has been flying for 10 years," noted HSC's CMIS program manager, Joe Geary, "so we have a decade of operational experience to draw on in developing CMIS. The TMI sensor added new technologies and capabilities to microwave imaging, and CMIS will go even further by incorporating the sounder. We have a super team of engineers who can't wait to start on this project."

By detecting microwave energy from the earth's surface and atmosphere, the sensor is able to peer into and through clouds, whereas traditional visible and infrared sensors are able to see only the tops of cloud formations. The data collected allow NOAA and NASA to observe meteorological phenomena such as storms and the "El Niño" ocean patterns. The military uses the information for tropical storm reconnaissance, ship routing in polar regions, agricultural weather reports, aircraft routing and refueling, and communications management.

Hughes also plans to submit a bid for the NPOESS platform, which will be decided in a separate competition.

HSC is the world's leading manufacturer of commercial communications satellites, having built 40 percent of those in operation. It also supplies spacecraft and communications equipment to the U.S. government, as well as scientific and meteorological instruments and satellites to the U.S. and Japanese government. HSC is a unit of Hughes Electronics Corporation. The earnings of Hughes Electronics are used to calculate the earnings per share attributable to GMH (NYSE symbol) common stock.