The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is exercising a six month option for a $5.9 million contract to Planet to advance the use of high revisit imagery and automated processing to augment and facilitate NGA analysis processes.

NGA exercised the option to continue development and evaluation of the broader National System for Geospatial Intelligence community needs for Planet’s commercial imagery data to inform customers’ future technical requirements.

The Planet subscription contract provides new daily imagery over the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility and areas of interest in the U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command areas of responsibility.

NGA also entered into a cooperative research and development agreement with Planet in April 2018, following the purchase of a $14 million subscription for Planet imagery in July 2017 and an introductory contract NGA signed with Planet in 2016.

Executive Comment

Scot Currie, NGA’s deputy director of Source Operations Group, said that over the last three years, Planet data has been used by the combatant commands to support their ongoing missions around the world and to train automated analytic systems to monitor and recognize changes in those operational environments.