ST. LOUIS — The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is planning a brand new procurement of business services to watch activities from space.
“We’re preparing for business advancements in analytics through our upcoming Luno contract,” NGA’s director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 22 on the GEOINT 2023 symposium.
Luno is the follow-on to NGA’s economic indicator monitoring (EIM) contract that the agency began in 2021. Nearly $30 million in task orders were awarded to 5 vendors. A further $60 million is projected to be spent on task orders over five years.
In preparation for the Luno contract, NGA solicited comments from the industry earlier this yr.
EIM sought business geospatial data and analytics services to enhance the U.S. government’s insights on economic activity, adversaries’ military capabilities and trends world wide, reminiscent of the flow of raw materials, agricultural products, fuels and vehicles.
Luno will address a broader range of topics and can give attention to the timeliness of the intelligence, Whitworth said. “We see automated 3D mapping, autonomous vehicles can already capture and process 3D data in real time. And so they’ve set mass market expectations.”
In keeping with NGA’s request for information, Luno seeks “unclassified computer vision capabilities to incorporate object detection, object classification, object segmentation, pattern detection, broad area search, area monitoring and have mapping that can augment existing unclassified and classified capabilities and data sources.”
The info provided by Luno contracts has to “integrate directly into analytic workflows for operational use,” said NGA.
Data from multiple sources
Whitworth said the U.S. intelligence community wants fully analyzed data from multiple sources. “We imagine industry’s ability to self organize into multi-sourced consortiums will provide never before seen opportunities,” he said. “Unclassified services will deliver enriched data and maintain custody of activity of interest.”
So-called “custody services” also will likely be sought under Luno. “These can provide defense, civil and intelligence customers with reliable periodic updates of the position and disposition of objects and activity throughout time and space,” Whitworth said.
The Luno contract will attempt to deal with industry concerns that government procurements of business data prescribe what the answer ought to be, quite than let corporations give you options.
“We envision tasking for the insights we desire, and letting industry provide us with one of the best mixture of sources and analytics required to deliver the insight,” said Whitworth. “As a substitute of us buying different analytical services and mixing them ourselves. industry will try this themselves.”
“We also see consortiums of corporations in a position to tip and cue to keep up custody of high interest activity objects over time,” he added. “There will likely be a shift from buying evaluation as a service to purchasing business orchestration as a service.”
Luno is ‘the subsequent step’
James Griffith, NGA’s director of source operations and management, told reporters May 22 that EIM projects are still in progress and the agency has not yet rolled out a procurement strategy for Luno.
EIM is a multi-vendor contract. NGA in 2021 chosen five vendors to compete for awards: BAE Systems, Ball Aerospace, BlackSky, Continental Mapping Consultants and Royce Geospatial Consultants.
Griffith said NGA views the EIM program as a pilot for the way to acquire business services. “Luno is the subsequent step, which will likely be a more comprehensive vehicle.”
“A part of our charter relative to business will not be just identifying and assessing recent capabilities after which exposing them to the community,” Griffith said. “It’s also then with the ability to agilely deliver them so that they’re operationally relevant. And Luno is our vehicle to try this.”
Luno is being designed to “define a bunch of various areas where we’re occupied with using business imagery and computer vision to support U.S. government operations,” he said. An example is likely to be data for humanitarian assistance operations in support of USAID.