David Gauthier, director of the commercial and business operations group at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), has said the agency plans to coordinate with industry on using nontraditional data sources for geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) efforts.
Gauthier told SapceNews in an interview published Monday that NGA wants to leverage “anything that provides a location of activities, objects or events” as well as approaches like radio-frequency mapping to address emerging GEOINT and analytics requirements.
“We want commercial industry to develop automated imagery exploitation algorithms, and to bring multiple sources together so that we can get a stream of information or daily feeds, and activity updates that feed our national security algorithm,” he noted.
According to Gauthier, NGA is specifically interested in nontraditional imaging approaches such as hyperspectral imagery and synthetic aperture radar-based (SAR) small satellite imagery.
He added that he envisions data collation methods that “wouldn’t normally be attainable from imagery alone” in the long run.
“We want companies to be vibrant and in a competitive market that sells to a lot of sectors,” said Gauthier. “SAR will be an interesting one. There’s a lot of demand but also a lot of supply and we’ll see what happens.”
