got geoint?

Welcome once again to our Friday’s Food for Thought post on got geoint? For anyone living in the mid-Atlantic region, you all have experienced an unusual Winter this year, marked by several snow storms — some being very being pretty massive. And, a major snow storm is predicted to hit this weekend, and the masses are being whipped up into a frenzy; the shelves at stores are being cleared out by hoarding consumers, Washington DC has already declared a State of Emergency,” and Arlington County executives told citizens to “shelter in place” for up to five days with supplies of nonperishable food, flashlights and extra batteries. What? Is this the end of the world as we know it (more on that)? For those of us who grew up in New England and the snow-prone states like Michigan and Minnesota, we can’t help but get a chuckle out of this mass hysteria. Happy Friday!

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The Obama administration’s proposed budget for fiscal 2011 has reignited a major dispute over a multibillion-dollar effort to replace the nation’s aging spy satellites. Senate Intelligence ranking member Kit Bond, R-Mo., said Tuesday he was under the impression there was support in the administration for a plan to have the government buy a constellation of small, relatively cheap satellites to support intelligence and military operations. The plan was approved last year by the full committee. But there was no funding for the plan in the administration’s fiscal 2011 budget request released Monday, Bond said during a hearing to examine threats to U.S. national security. Instead, the budget seeks funding for a different plan called Imagery Way Ahead, which calls for buying large, powerful and expensive electro-optical satellites while purchasing more data from U.S. commercial satellite companies. Check out the full Government Executive article here.

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EADS North America has received a five-year contract to provide commercial radar satellite data to the U.S. government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for use in intelligence, military and homeland security applications. The data will be provided by the geo-information service provider, Infoterra GmbH, an EADS Astrium subsidiary that holds the commercial exploitation rights for the German radar satellite TerraSAR-X. This Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract has a value of up to $85 million, and involves the supply of imagery from TerraSAR-X, an EADS Astrium-built synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, along with related products and direct downlink services. The data will enable the NGA to provide other U.S. government and DoD agencies improved information acquisition capabilities — particularly in bad weather and low light conditions. Read the full press release here.

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A series of textbooks dating from the 1950s taught a generation of students that science could also be art. But research progresses and artistic methods evolve, so Wired has brought these mid-century classics up to and have taken these text books and inserted a GEOINT flare. From lessons about earthquake visualization to the mapping of mars, Wired has taken these classic tomes and added 3D and enhanced visualization that, to us, screams of GEOINT. So, the big question is when are all students going to be getting their 3D/GEOINT-enhanced science lessons on iPads? It’s only a matter of time.

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