WASHINGTON — BlackSky, a company that takes pictures of the Earth and analyzes them, got a $3.5 million deal from the Air Force Research Laboratory. This contract is for providing satellite pictures and analysis to help the Air Force keep track of moving targets around the world. The Air Force announced this on March 8.
This award comes right after a research contract last year, and a $2 million award announced on March 4 to provide satellite pictures and access to BlackSky's data analysis platform to the Air Force. With the $2 million contract, the AFRL will use the pictures to do research and train computer programs that can find and follow moving things and targets in space.
The $3.5 million contract is the first task in a contract that is worth up to $23 million over four years, according to an AFRL spokesperson.
BlackSky was chosen for a Space Technology Advanced Research (STAR) contract, which the AFRL uses to quickly get new things for space research.
“The STAR contract will be using BlackSky's commercial data sources and AI/ML algorithm expertise to help a program that is testing how well commercial and friend countries' moving target finding tools can be used by the military,” the spokesperson said. ISR is short for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
The $3.5 million job is specifically for what the AFRL calls global moving target engagement, to “explore the utility of commercial data sources and their related algorithms to detect moving objects globally and at scale.”
BlackSky and its partners, according to AFRL, “will use data sources of different kinds together with computer programs that can learn in a data combination approach to make commercial moving object finding better.”
Finding targets in space is a big goal
Using satellites to find moving targets is a big goal for the U.S. Air Force as they move from using planes to using space systems. The Air Force wants to be able to find these things without using people in planes in places where they might not be safe.
Another company that takes pictures of the Earth, Umbra, also got deals to check the use of radar satellites to find moving targets.
For many years, the U.S. military has used planes with radar, called JSTARS, to tell things apart from the noise on the ground.
By using commercial satellite images and analysis, the military is trying to learn about how well satellites can watch things happening on the ground. The Air Force, at the same time, is working with the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office to make a secret group of satellites to watch moving targets on the ground.
