Weekly GEOINT Community News

Airbus and Orbital Insight Launch Earth Monitor

Airbus Defence and Space and Orbital Insight have expanded upon their partnership agreement to create Earth Monitor, a change analysis and insights service that provides situational awareness over archived or newly tasked areas of interest. Earth Monitor, available through Airbus’ OneAtlas Platform, leverages Orbital Insight’s machine learning and computer vision expertise through algorithms that detect changes in infrastructure and land use in near real-time as well as identify and count cars, trucks, and soon, aircraft. This advanced service fuses Airbus’ reactive tasking capabilities and premium archive imagery from the Living Library to offer access to advanced statistical analyses, trends, and detection maps.

GDIT Awarded NGA GEOINT Content Sustainment Contract

General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) was awarded a potential $42.5M contract to help the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) maintain software platforms, applications, and databases that store web-based GEOINT. NGA announced the award in a FedBizOpps notice posted last week. Work will include sustainment of the agency’s Active Earthscape, Aeronautical Content Exploitation System, Consolidated Surface Production Environment, Geomatics, GeoNames, and Navigation Safety System.

KeyW Announces Merger Agreement with Jacobs

KeyW announced last week it has signed a definitive agreement and plan of merger with Jacobs and Atom Acquisition Sub, Inc.—a newly created, wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Jacobs—to be acquired by Jacobs for $11.25 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $815 million. Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, KeyW will become a wholly-owned, indirect subsidiary of Jacobs. The merger was unanimously approved by the members of each company’s board of directors voting on the transaction. 

Peer Intel

Peggy Agouris, dean of the College of Science at George Mason University, was selected as William & Mary’s sixth provost. Agouris, who as dean currently oversees 4,000 students, naerly 700 faculty and staff, and an annual budget of more than $80 million, will begin at William & Mary July 1.

Army Lt. Gen. Karen H. Gibson joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as deputy director of national intelligence for national security partnerships. She arrived April 1 from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., where she served as the intelligence director, J-2, for U.S. Central Command.

Keith J. Masback, former CEO of USGIF and a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, was recently named Geospatial Ambassador of the Year by Geospatial World. For 10 years, Masback led USGIF in its mission to promote the geospatial intelligence tradecraft to develop a stronger GEOINT community among government, industry, academia, professional organizations, and individuals.

Image courtesy of Airbus and Orbital Insight