BlackSky wins Air Force research contract to track vehicles in real time from space
by Staff Writers
Herndon VA (SPX) Oct 17, 2023
BlackSky Technology Inc. (NYSE: BKSY) won a competitive U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory AFWERX Direct to Phase 2 contract, funded by the Space Development Agency, to build an automated target recognition service that will gather and combine radio frequency and electro-optical satellite sensor data to track mobile assets in real-time and securely distribute actionable intelligence to remote devices and analysts worldwide.

"BlackSky's first-of-its-kind commercial, vertically integrated space and ground architecture takes advantage of contemporary advances in AI and edge processing to advance the DOD's real-time imagery and analytics delivery requirements," said Patrick O'Neil, BlackSky chief technology officer. "The company's rapid-revisit capabilities and leading innovations in automated detection give customers an opportunity to conduct ISR operations from space."

BlackSky has a proven ability to track moving targets on-orbit using its proprietary electro-optical high-resolution satellite constellation. Unlike traditional moving target indicators that rely exclusively on radar sensors, the BlackSky Spectra platform uses multi-frame Burst imagery and computer vision to fuse open-source intelligence feeds with multi-sensor imagery to provide information and intelligence on critical targets of interest.

"BlackSky will take advantage of our existing commercial ground and space architectures that enable assured secure tasking, collection, and low-latency data delivery to make mobile asset monitoring possible at scale," said O'Neil.

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