Weekly GEOINT Community News

Esri Announces Significant Expansion in St. Louis; DARPA Awards Maxar Second Contract for Geospatial Cloud Analytics Hub; NOAA Awards Harris $284 Million GOES-R Ground Segment Contract Extension; More

JOE-JOE-the-stom

Esri Announces Significant Expansion in St. Louis

Esri announced its St. Louis, Mo., office intends to triple its current professional services staff to support a growing user base. The expanded office will serve as a central hub for Esri to support users in the St. Louis area and across the U.S. The decision to create expanded capabilities in St. Louis emerged from the area’s recent growth and transformation into a strong center of professional excellence and innovation in the GIS sector. While the Esri team already includes a mix of geospatial technologists across many disciplines, growth in demand for consultation, geospatial strategy, and implementation support across the GIS user base has made it necessary to increase staff to serve those needs. The central U.S. location will also make it easier for Esri to support customers across the country.

DARPA Awards Maxar Second Contract for Geospatial Cloud Analytics Hub

Maxar Technologies announced it has been awarded a follow-on contract valued at $4.3 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test its Geospatial Cloud Analytics (GCA) Hub. The GCA Hub is an unclassified environment with multi-source content that enables military users to leverage machine learning to extract insights about the planet at scale and to make critical decisions. This raises Maxar’s total award amount for the GCA Hub to $7.5 million.

Under its first GCA Hub contract awarded by DARPA in 2018, Maxar built GCA Hub on the foundations of its Geospatial Big Data (GBDX) platform. Under phase two of the GCA Hub contract, 10 Technical Area 2 Expert (TA2) providers are building and training machine learning models in Maxar’s GCA Hub that seek to address use cases designated by DARPA. Maxar provides technical support as the TA2 providers work to make sense of the growing volume of geospatial data, which can be mined to reveal insights about a wide range of pressing national security concerns.

NOAA Awards Harris $284 Million GOES-R Ground Segment Contract Extension

NOAA awarded Harris Corporation a three-year, $284 million sole-source extension on the ground segment contract supporting Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) -R Series weather satellites. The extension will modernize the ground-computing infrastructure and reduce the IT footprint, laying the foundation for future migration to cloud technologies. It extends the partnership with NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) to 13 years, and brings the total contract value to $1.65 billion.

The GOES-R ground segment controls and commands NOAA’s two new geostationary weather satellites, GOES-16 (East) and GOES-17 (West), and will control GOES-T and GOES-U satellites after their launches. The ground segment controls the Harris-built main payload, the Advanced Baseline Imager, and other onboard instruments. 

ICEYE and APSI to Provide South Korean New Space Market with SAR Imaging Solutions

APSI (Asia Pacific Satellite Inc.) and ICEYE announced that the organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding about working together to support the South Korean New Space market. As a part of the agreement, APSI will supply ICEYE’s SAR imagery in South Korea. The agreement also provides mutual support from both APSI and ICEYE to deliver radar imaging related satellite solutions for the South Korean market.

HPE to Acquire Seattle’s Cray 

HPE announced plans Friday to acquire Seattle’s Cray for $1.3 billion in a deal that links two iconic brands in computing history. HPE said it intends to merge Cray’s supercomputing product lineup within its roster of server and high-performance computing products, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of HPE’s 2020 fiscal year subject to the approval of Cray’s shareholders.

Peer Intel

MITRE announced Charles Clancy as vice president for intelligence programs, effective July 8, and Gus Bentivegna as its new vice president of human resources and talent enablement, effective immediately.

 

Image courtesy of NOAA

Posted in: Monday News Kickoffs   Tagged in: Analysis, GIS, Remote Sensing, Weather

Weekly GEOINT Community News

Penn State Partners with NGA; VRICON Introduces DSM for $1.99/km; Woolpert Acquires Leica LiDAR Systems

Weekly GEOINT Community News

ODNI Releases Transparency Plan; Engility Wins USNORTHCOM Contract; Leidos Awarded DARPA Contract

Weekly GEOINT Community News

NGA Releases Commercial GEOINT Strategy; IBM Acquires Weather Company Data; DigitalGlobe Expands Services with Intelescope and MapBox