On April 25, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency posted a solicitation for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) Automated Analytics for Maritime Law Enforcement and Security (AA MLES). Responses are due by 12:00 p.m. Central on May 16.
Most seagoing vessels are required to broadcast their location, speed, and heading using a transponder system called Automatic Identification System (AIS). Although AIS was originally developed to supplement radar for ship-on-ship collision avoidance, the system is broadly utilized by owners, insurers, governments, and port authorities to track vessels’ locations and activities globally. Vessels engaging in illegal activities, such as sanction breaching, dumping, illegal fishing, or trafficking, regularly switch the system off (e.g. grey vessels) or spoof its location in an attempt to mask these activities (e.g. dark vessels).
NGA requires a commercial capability to detect and classify surface vessels through an automated algorithm via Electro-Optical (EO) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to determine their identity, location, speed, and heading across open ocean, despite their AIS activity. Furthermore, NGA requires the ability to maintain near-real time custody and high confidence positive ID of vessels to support interdiction operations.
The Contractor shall use existing capabilities to automatically identify, classify, and geo-locate surface vessels from commercial EO and SAR imagery across open ocean, and receive those observations in a timeframe and format that enables interdiction as deemed necessary.
Review the NGA maritime domain awareness solicitation.
Source: SAM
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By Loren Blinde
April 29, 2024
