Weekly GEOINT Community News

Esri Partners with Waze; White House Announces Small Satellite Initiative; OGSystems Partners with TransVoyant; Air Force Space Surveillance Telescope to Track Objects in Orbit

CubeSats

Esri Partners with Waze

Esri announced a new partnership with Waze to help governments around the world build intelligent transportation systems in their communities. Governments already using Esri’s ArcGIS platform can easily exchange data through the Waze Connected Citizens Program, a free, two-way data share of publicly available traffic information. The partnership enables communities to extend the reach of the data they map and manage by sharing it with Waze, which has more than 65 million monthly active users worldwide. This initiative allows government transparency and collaboration with citizens to help people better navigate their streets and highways.

White House Announces Small Satellite Initiative

According to The Verge, the White House announced its plan to promote the use of small satellites in an effort to strengthen the burgeoning U.S. commercial space industry. The plan will spur collaboration between government agencies and the private sector to find practical uses for small sats. NASA will spend up to $25 million to purchase small sat data to help with its study of Earth science, with an additional $5 million to make small sat technology more robust. NASA will also create the Small Spacecraft Virtual Institute under its Ames Research Center, with the purpose of discovering new ways to incorporate commercial small sats into NASA missions.

OGSystems Partners with TransVoyant

OGSystems is now partnered with TransVoyant to help develop OGSystems’ BlueGlass platform. The platform combines commercial remote sensing, big data, and cognitive analytics to deliver real-time insights through situational awareness, anomaly, alerting, and reporting of activities that could pose risk to the operations of its users. The partnership also equips OGSystems customers with TransVoyant’s Precise Predictive Intelligence solution, which analyzes and predicts global, real-time, and future behavior across multiple sectors.

Air Force Space Surveillance Telescope to Track Objects in Orbit

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) has been handed over to Air Force Space Command, reports Popular Science. SST was one of DARPA’s longest-running projects and is the 10th largest telescope in the continental U.S. The telescope will map and track objects in geosynchronous orbit, as well as determine whether they are new objects and what danger they might pose to satellites currently in orbit. The Air Force is expected have the telescope operational in Australia by 2020.

CDB Becomes OGC Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) approved the modeling & simulation world’s Common Database (CDB) as an OGC standard. The standard addresses the challenge of full plug-and-play interoperability and reuse of geospatial data in a modeling and simulation environment. The CDB standard is in the process of being published and will soon be made available.

Peer Intel

Harold “Hal” Smith, former associate deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA), joined Accenture Federal Services as a managing director to lead its intelligence practice. Smith has held intelligence, security, and technology roles at various public companies, where he developed or led large-scale practices and served on several Intelligence Community senior advisory boards.

Photo Credit: NASA

Posted in: Monday News Kickoffs   Tagged in: GIS, NASA, Small Sats, Standards

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