Weekly GEOINT Community News

NGA Director Signs Record of Decision for NGA Campus West

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Director Robert Cardillo signed a Record of Decision last week indicating the agency’s final selection for its NGA West headquarters. The decision designates the north St. Louis City site, at the corner of north Jefferson and Cass avenues, as the future location of NGA West.

French Navy Awards Airbus Defence and Telespazio France

Airbus Defence and Space and satellite services company Telespazio France were awarded a four-year contract by the French Navy to deliver satellite-based maritime surveillance services. Airbus Defence and Space and Telespazio France will employ a combination of satellites for the Trimara-2 contract. This contract, which runs from 2016 to 2020, will improve the effectiveness of the French Navy’s missions on the world’s oceans to include combating trafficking, preventing illegal immigration, performing search and rescue operations, detecting pollution and toxic discharges, and monitoring protected maritime areas.

World View and Ball Aerospace to Explore Stratollite Platform

World View and Ball Aerospace are collaborating to explore World View’s Stratollite platform—a new category of “above-earth vehicles”—for remote sensing applications. The two companies are working together to explore the feasibility of a commercial capability to perform persistent remote sensing from Stratollites, which are high-tech balloons offering long-duration, persistent flights above specific geographic areas.

KEYW Wins U.S. Navy IT Contract

KEYW was awarded a prime position on a five-year, multiple-award contract with a $245 million value to provide research and development supporting the information technology division at the Naval Research Laboratory. KEYW competed for and was awarded all seven customer research fields and will provide research and development, test and evaluation, and technical services support to a variety of IT research and development programs.

NASA Finds Arctic Getting Greener

According to a NASA study, northern parts of North America are becoming greener and almost a third of the land cover—much of which is the Arctic tundra—is looking more like landscapes found in warmer ecosystems, reports a Phys.org article. In 87,000 images captured by Landsat satellites, researchers found western Alaska, Quebec, and other regions became greener between 1984 and 2012. The new Landsat study further supports previous work that has shown changing vegetation in Arctic and northern regions of North America.

Photo Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Cindy Starr