Source: Maxar Technologies
WASHINGTON: Satellite imagery behemoth Maxar Technologies has won $20 million in contracts from NGA to provide land use change detection analysis. Near real-time change detection analysis is a bit of a holy grail for US intelligence agencies as they keep tabs on adversaries.
As Maxar explains in its press release today, “Automated change detection visually exposes areas of important change, enabling rapid and effective intelligence gathering across thousands of images from multiple sources.”
Under the contracts, the company will provide “updates and enhancements using its sophisticated change detection model and deliver land cover and classification solutions in support of NGA’s needs.” Land cover classification, the Maxar release says, “provides a global view of the current landscape by applying machine learning to perform automated spectral, spatial and temporal classification, enabling a better understanding of how specific regions of Earth are being used on a micro scale.”
The contracts were awarded through NGA’s Janus Geography Program, which was launched in 2017 to help the agency “produce a comprehensive, worldwide, authoritative, seamless dataset using traditional and non-traditional data sources.” The data management program was structured to establish a pool of potential vendors that could be rapidly contracted for needed data or analysis — with a total of some $920 million in contracts potentially available over 10 years.
In 2018, NGA chose 10 vendors for Janus Geography: Altamira Technologies, BAE Systems Inc., Boeing, CACI International, Centra Technology, then-Harris (now L3Harris), Hexagon US Federal, Leidos, Vencore and Maxar’s Radiant Solutions.
Maxar, which swallowed Earth observation satellite operator Digital Globe in 2017, is a major contractor to NGA for geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and analysis, as well as to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for raw satellite imagery that is used by NRO’s analysts via the long-standing EnhancedView program.
However, NRO is moving to expand its supply base for imagery beyond EnhancedView. As I reported earlier this month, NRO intends to release a Request for Proposal in the third quarter of this year, followed by the award of multiple commercial imagery contracts in the fourth quarter.
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