The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) later this fall plans to issue a new broad agency announcement (BAA) to solicit research and technology proposals to meet government needs within the agency’s primary technical domains.
The three-year BAA is expected to be released by Nov. 1 and will fund basic and applied research, advanced technology development, and advanced component development and prototypes, NGA says in its draft Boosting Innovative GEOINT—Science and Technology BAA issued on Tuesday. Feedback on the draft BIG-ST BAA is due by Oct. 1.
NGA’s main technical domains of interest are foundational GEOINT, advanced phenomenologies, and analytic technologies. Foundational GEOINT refers to accurate, high-resolution, and constantly updated Earth imagery that includes things like earth gravitational models, world magnetic models, infrastructure models, and assured positioning, navigation, timing, and resilience.
Under advanced phenomenologies, NGA is interested in “innovations advancing the design and development of algorithms, components, and enabling technologies for systems” in a number of areas such as detecting, tracking, and identifying targets in complex environments, sensing and processing of static and dynamic targets in real-time, space situational awareness, and multi-domain data aggregation.
To further exploit the Earth imagery data NGA uses, the agency has increasingly been seeking more analytics from the vendor community. The draft BAA says topics of interest within analytics technologies include geospatial signatures detection, analysis, and tracking, stand-off detection of counter-proliferation and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive activities, automated target recognition, human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence, and water security.
Once the BAA is released, NGA plans to seek abstracts and proposals through topic calls that will be published while the solicitation remains open.