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Rather than equipping the warfighter with bulky helmets and goggles to provide vital battlefield data, DARPA is moving forward with an innovative program where contact lenses with built-in systems would allow soldiers to focus on distant targets and overlay their vision with tactical information. According to DARPA, the goal of the effort is to provide individual soldiers with data from aerial drones and battlefield sensors in real-time — which was previously a capability challenge.

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Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from got geoint? As always, we hope you had a restful weekend and are supercharged for the work week ahead. Based on our research for today’s post, we can safely say that USGIF member companies are keeping the GEOINT newscycle bustling along this week. There are plenty of announcements from companies like CACI, TerraGo, LizardTech and more in this installment of the MMNKO post. So, as we always say, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on. Happy Monday!

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Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off from got geoint? As we kick off the work week on this special day (Halloween anyone?), we are reminded that, while many are preparing their children for this special evening or attending Halloween parties at their kids’ schools, the GEOINT news cycle still hums along. We have never had a MMNKO post where we were short on news. Why? Because GEOINT pretty much permeates every aspect of our lives. And our faithful readers can see this first hand in today’s post. So, as we always say, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on. Happy Halloween!

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Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from got geoint? As our faithful readers know, there is always an abundance of GEOINT-related news the week after the GEOINT Symposium. From the continuing news cycle that started during the event to member companies seeking to maintain their established momentum, there is typically a wide-range of stories from policy and budgeting news to product launches and beyond. So, fire up that second cup of coffee as we take you through all the GEOINT news you need to kick off the work week. Happy Monday!

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GPS systems play a critical role in helping the warfighter gain vital situational awareness and navigational capabilities during a conflict. Though one of the biggest challenges is that GPS systems have become more susceptible to jamming. To counter this, DARPA’s Micro-Technology for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (Micro-PNT) program is creating a navigation and timing unit that will fit on a microchip. The new solution would enhance personal navigation because these new devices would continue tracking location even when GPS signals are not available.

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Energy efficiency and innovation are the name of the game when it comes to a new new solar powered drone being developing for the Pentagon by Boeing. Dubbed the SolarEagle, this innovative drone will be capable of flying for five straight years at 60,000 feet. According to the LA Times, Boeing recently announced it had won the $89-million contract with DARPA to develop a prototype of the SolarEagle that can demonstrate it can stay aloft for 30 days by 2014. According to DARPA, the program will “enable a re-taskable, persistent pseudo-satellite capability in an aircraft package. The technology combines the key benefits of an aircraft (flexibility & responsiveness, sensor resolution, reduced transmit/receive power, affordable deployment) with the benefits of a satellite (on- station persistence, no logistics tail, zero emissions, energy independence, minimal fleet size, absence of in-country footprint).” Very interesting stuff. Is this the future of GEOINT? Check out more here.

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Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working on a way to enhance infrared imaging with a series of holes that are each just 1.6 millionths of a meter wide. Nestled inside each one of those nano-sized holes are quantum dots, ultra-tiny crystals packing some super-powerful optical and semiconductor magic. This bit of microscopic trickery creates images and night vision that’s 20 times sharper than the best systems we have now. The word is that it is infrared, so the cameras will be able to spot heat sources, maybe even through walls. Speaking of seeing through walls, you all may recall our story about DARPA developing technologies to do just that with the Comprehensive Interior Reconnaissance program. Check out more from DVICE here.

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The editorial staff of got geoint? had the pleasure of sitting through the USGIF Technology Day Emerging Technologies Showcase, which highlighted a number of very cutting-edge developments in the GEOINT Community in the form of demonstrations from Open Geospatial Consortium, DAPRA, GITA and many others. The morning was kicked off with a presentation by Paul Rutherford, Chief Technology Officer, Isilon Systems. Paul showcased Isilon’s clustered storage and data management solutions for file-based data that aim to maximize the performance of their mission-critical applications, workflows, and processes.

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Welcome to the highly lauded Friday’s Food for Thought post on got geoint? Is everyone happy that it is Friday? Rhetorical question, right! Well, this has been a most interesting week in the GEOINT world. We have a potentially devastating oil spill that is headed to the Louisiana coast, the CIA is developing micro UAV’s that are the size of a pizza platter, and DARPA lost contact with its Hypersonic Glider. So, we thought that this week’s FFT post can be all about being lost in space. There’s even a toothbrush floating around in space as we speak. Read on and enjoy.

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The highly anticipated test flight of the unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) — designed to fly through the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of up to Mach 20 — turned out to be a complete failure as military scientists lost contact with the glider nine minutes into the mission, last week. The glider was intended to be a new way of hitting distant targets with conventional weapons within an hour, which is being dubbed a “prompt global strike.” The test flight was a 30-minute mission in which the vehicle would glide at high speed before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. A DARPA spokesperson had this to say to AFP about the failed mission: “This was our first flight (all others were done in wind tunnels and simulations) so although of course we would like to have everything go perfectly, we still gathered data and can use findings for the next flight, scheduled currently for early 2011.” Look forward to seeing if this glitch is fixed by the 2011 test flight. Read the full AFP article here.

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