NGA looking to academia and industry to boost research efforts

Nathan Strout

The National-Geospatial-Intelligence Agency issued a new Broad Agency Announcement July 6, giving researchers and academics a new pathway to present intelligence solutions to the agency.

NGA is responsible for delivering geospatial-intelligence to war fighters, policy makers and the intelligence community. Under this announcement, the agency is looking for solutions from industry and academia to help them accomplish that mission.

“The release of this BAA will help accelerate our research endeavors and provide NGA with the ability to expand and diversify its research performer base, while giving us better flexibility and agility in research contracting efforts,” said Cindy Daniell, director of research and NGA, in a statement.

The BAA is seeking research and development concepts that address one or more of the following topics: Foundational GEOINT; advanced phenomenologies, and analytic technologies.

• Foundational GEOINT - The creation of always accurate, high-resolution, continually updated representations of the earth's properties, available on demand.
• Advanced Phenomenologies - The use of novel methods and efficient strategies to deliver spatially, spectrally and temporally resolved data from a growing number of traditional and non-traditional sources.
• Analytic Technologies - The ability to leverage new data sources and new analytics techniques to add geospatial intelligence to multi-intelligence analytics in an effort to address emerging threats and mission domains.

More details on each technical domain can be found in the BAA.

According to the announcement, NGA plans to make multiple awards, which may take the form of procurement contracts, grants, cooperative agreements or other transactions for prototypes and follow-on production. The agency will be issuing response dates for individual topic areas within the three stated technical domains periodically. A COVID-19 rapid response topic will be one of the first items posted under the BAA according to NGA.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2020/07/07/nga-looking-to-academia-and-industry-to-boost-research-efforts/