Via Satellite illustration.

Due to significant demand under an existing contract for geospatial-intelligence (GEOINT) data to analyze visible economic indicators, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) plans to award a new contract for commercial GEOINT services value at $290 million, the agency said last week.

NGA on Jan. 10 released the solicitation for the LUNO A program, for which multiple vendors will be selected in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 to compete for task orders under the $290 million program to monitor global economic and environmental activity and military capabilities. LUNO A will replace the $60 million Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) contract awarded in August 2021.

The original EIM contract was for $29 million and was expanded to $60 million due to strong demand for the unclassified analytics and services.

“Because of the incredible success with the EIM contract, we’ve substantially increased our financial commitment to commercial capabilities with LUNO A,” Devin Brande, director of NGA Commercial Operations, said in a statement. “As the quantity and quality of commercial data continues to increase, we must continue to partner effectively with industry to keep pace with state-of-the-art analytic capabilities and meet the increasing demands of our customers.”

NGA has said the new five-year contract will give it more access to data and services, accelerate analysis workflow, and integrate data and services into enterprise capabilities.

LUNO A will also leverage computer vision technologies that include object detection, object classification, object segmentation, pattern detection, broad area search and monitoring, and feature mapping in six areas of interest. Those areas are general change detection, climate security and natural resources, feature identification, infrastructure and high cadence transportation network monitoring, facility monitoring, incidental and fortuitous processing, and emerging products, data and services, NGA said.

The current contractors that compete for task orders on the EIM contract are BAE Systems, Ball Aerospace, BlackSky Technology, Continental Mapping Consultants, and Royce Geospatial Consultants.

Bids for LUNO A are due by March 26.

This story was first published by Defense Daily