Rendering of a BlackSky satellite. Photo: BlackSky

BlackSky won a $24 million Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) contract to develop moving target engagement services, the company announced Wednesday. BlackSky received an initial award of $3.5 million. 

Blacksky said it will use its Spectra tasking and analytics platform to demonstrate how AI and machine learning techniques affect multi-INT collection, automatic tipping-and-cueing, direct downlink and moving target engagement within an exercise environment.

“BlackSky’s software-first, AI approach will add depth and scale to commercial space-based moving target detection, tracking and identification at machine speed,” said Brian E. O’Toole, BlackSky CEO. “BlackSky Spectra has been optimized to perform in resource-limited environments and will demonstrate the ability to fuse information in a hybrid setting from multiple government ISR and commercial data sources.”