Northrop Grumman to provide navigation system for sun exploration mission

• Northrop Grumman (NOC -0.1%) has been awarded a nearly $3M contract from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to supply its space inertial reference system for the Solar Probe Plus program, which APL manages for NASA.
• Solar Probe Plus is expected to launch in 2018 and will explore the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, for the first time.