The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded Maxar Technologies land cover and enhanced application programming interface (API) contracts worth up to $35.8 million.
“Maxar is proud to continue partnering with NGA on enduring missions such as foundation geospatial intelligence, land cover, and intelligence support, as well as to help spur innovation in new areas like automation,” Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager for public sector earth intelligence at Maxar, said in a press release. “Public-private partnerships such as this represent the U.S. government’s ongoing commitment to commercial space and geospatial analytics technology.”
The first award, which is part of NGA’s Janus Geography program, will allow the geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) agency to access commercial data in an unclassified cloud computing environment. The award is a one-year period of performance contract worth up to $22.5 million, with $11.3 million initially funded.
Under this contract, Maxar’s data will characterize land cover over previously unmapped areas – delivering foundational GEOINT data to NGA by characterizing land cover at high resolution over numerous previously unmapped areas.
The second award is worth up to $13.3 million for a performance period of up to 4.5 years, consisting of a base of six months and four full option years to support computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications.
Under the second award, Maxar will provide NGA’s Foundation Program with a modern, enhanced API capable of querying, discovering, and downloading Maxar products derived from the company’s 125-petabyte high-resolution commercial imagery archive.
In addition, the enhanced API award will deliver content to the end user’s cloud account rather than via legacy dissemination methods – additional options include third-party content integration, full business analytics, and greater production capacity.
