Weekly GEOINT Community News

NGA Announces Sixth BIG Initiative Topic

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) announced the sixth topic of its Boosting Innovative GEOINT (BIG) Broad Agency Announcement initiative will be advanced geospatial analytics. According to the press release, NGA seeks innovative proposals for the development of analytic algorithms and methods to aid in the discovery of geospatial data that is currently unobserved or unknown, the characterization of geospatial data to provide insight and context, and the use of automated technologies to aid in the timely and accurate development of foundation data. NGA anticipates awarding multiple contracts for this topic area. The target award value for contracts will not exceed $500,000. The application period for the sixth topic area is open until Sept. 21 and questions may be submitted through Sept. 6.

Additionally, NGA awarded an Other Transaction Authority prototype agreement to System of Systems Security (SOSSEC) to drive innovative change into the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence and Allied System for Geospatial-Intelligence environments. The agreement has an approximate $30 million ceiling for multiple prototype project awards.

UrtheCast to Deliver SAR-XL Satellite

UrtheCast entered into a contract exceeding $100 million with a confidential customer for the development and delivery of a dual-frequency, stand-alone Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operational-class satellite as an accelerator for the OptiSAR Constellation. The contract will enable the company to build and launch a SAR satellite as a precursor mission to the OptiSAR Constellation. Using the same SAR technology the company has been developing for the OptiSAR constellation, this contract will allow UrtheCast to accelerate both the operationalization of its SAR technology and the start of its SAR data services business.

Crunchy Data Releases Open-Source Project

Crunchy Data released an open-source project that provides tools to automate compliance with the guidelines of the PostgreSQL Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project was developed to support NGA’s GEOINT Services mission to reduce the time it takes to secure authority to operate certification for cloud services. Crunchy Data and MITRE are teaming up on the design and development of an automated security compliance profile to validate the newly published PostgreSQL STIG.

Esri World Imagery Now in OpenStreetMap

Esri announced it is making its global collection of satellite imagery available in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community directly through World Imagery Service. This resource will be part of OSM’s growing catalog of reference layers and will provide one meter or better satellite and aerial photography of many parts of the world.

Peer Intel

President Trump recently appointed John Sherman chief information officer of the Intelligence Community. Sherman has spent more than 20 years in various roles in the IC, including most recently as deputy director of CIA’s Open Source Enterprise.

Photo Credit: UrtheCast