The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) announced on December 11 the award of two data integration study contracts, one to Capella Space, for commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and the other to Hawkeye 360, for commercial radio frequency (RF) remote sensing.
These contracts represent an important milestone in the
agency’s strategy of embracing both existing and emerging commercial geospatial
providers to create an integrated overhead architecture consisting of both
national and commercial capabilities.
“The NRO is interested in better understanding the current
capabilities of a variety of commercial vendors and assessing how those
capabilities could potentially support the NRO’s national security mission,”
said Pete Muend, director of the NRO Commercial Systems Program Office. “With
these two contracts, we are exploring the integration of commercial SAR and RF
in ordering and imagery delivery into the NRO architecture.”
SAR is an active imaging system that operates at frequencies
unaffected by weather. As such, SAR can penetrate clouds, darkness and
inclement weather to provide situational awareness under most conditions. These
capabilities make SAR valuable for a diverse range of applications including
intelligence analysis, battlefield reconnaissance, land and ocean monitoring,
and natural resource and agricultural monitoring and assessment.
Commercial RF data collection and processing aims to provide
analytics to identify and geolocate a broad set of RF signals, including
broadcast messages such as shipborne Automatic Identification Systems. These
integration study contracts will allow the NRO to evaluate the companies’
capabilities to meet NRO requirements. This helps the NRO effectively use the
full breadth of commercial imagery providers’ capabilities across multiple
phenomenologies.
“These latest study contracts reflect the NRO’s commitment
to full seamless enterprise integration of multiple sources and diverse
phenomenologies,” said Muend.
The contracts to Capella Space and Hawkeye 360 join four commercial imagery studies previously awarded by the NRO to BlackSky, HySpecIQ, Maxar Technologies, and Planet.
Source: NRO
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