Maxar
Technologies (NYSE: MAXR) (TSX: MAXR), a global technology innovator
powering the new space economy, today announced that it has been awarded
a follow-on contract valued at $4.3 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
to test its Geospatial Cloud Analytics (GCA) Hub.
The GCA Hub is an unclassified environment with multi-source content
that enables military users to leverage machine learning to extract
insights about the planet at scale and make critical decisions for
projects like predicting food shortages, political unrest and illegal,
unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. This raises Maxar’s total
award amount for the GCA Hub to $7.5 million.
Under its first
GCA Hub contract awarded by DARPA in 2018, Maxar built the secure,
cloud-based GCA Hub on the foundations of its Geospatial Big Data (GBDX)
platform, a commercially-developed, cloud-based analytics platform.
Maxar integrated 18 geospatial data sources, including its 100-petabyte
high-resolution optical satellite imagery library, RADARSAT-2 synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) data and SAR data curation and processing tools,
automatic identification system (AIS) data, open-source and commercial
data provided by the company’s growing list of content ecosystem
partners. These datasets help users detect features and changes on the
surface of the Earth faster and more accurately.
In addition, Maxar built new analytic tools to streamline and enhance
the creation of machine learning training data sets. This builds on the
company’s rich history of providing curated, open-source data sets for
machine learning challenges, such as SpaceNet,
xView
and IARPA
FMoW.
In phase two of the GCA Hub contract, 10 Technical Area 2 Expert (TA2)
providers are building and training machine learning models in Maxar’s
GCA Hub that seek to address use cases designated by DARPA. Maxar
provides technical support as the TA2 providers work to make sense of
the growing volume of geospatial data, which can be mined to reveal
insights about a wide range of pressing national security concerns.
“Maxar is proud that DARPA selected its GCA Hub for the testing phase of
this program, demonstrating that solutions can be made faster for the
end user when government harnesses commercial innovation,” said Tony
Frazier, Maxar’s Executive Vice President for Global Field Operations.
DARPA funded Lockheed
Martin, a TA2 provider working within Maxar’s GCA Hub, to create a
machine learning model that uses Maxar’s WorldView optical satellite
imagery and RADARSAT-2 SAR imagery to initially identify oil fracking
sites. This model aims to allow DARPA end users to monitor existing
sites and detect when new ones are built.
“Maxar’s GCA Hub makes it easy for Lockheed Martin to leverage multiple
high-quality data sources to build and train our oil fracking detection
model,” said Girard Andres, Lockheed Martin Director of Mission Systems
Capabilities. “With Maxar’s GCA Hub, our data scientists are now able to
extract geospatial information at scale, focus on understanding what’s
happening on Earth, and interpret that information to make critical
decisions with confidence.”
Lockheed Martin will be demonstrating their object detection and
classification model for identifying and monitoring facilities,
equipment and objects worldwide in Maxar’s GCA Hub at their booth at the GEOINT
Symposium in San Antonio, Texas from June 2-5, 2019.
In addition to traditional remote sensing data sources for machine
learning, Maxar’s GCA Hub also enables access to non-traditional data
sets required to perform geospatial predictive analytics. Another TA2
provider, Culmen
International, integrated a data set from a second Maxar product, Signature Analyst
Server, which should help DARPA research methods to detect and predict
foreign civil unrest.
“Maxar’s GCA Hub is a powerful, complementary tool for geospatial
predictive analytics and we look forward to further testing its
capabilities,” said Mark Dumas, Culmen’s Chief Strategy Officer and VP
of Technology Solutions.
The operations of DigitalGlobe, SSL and Radiant Solutions were unified
under the Maxar brand in February; MDA continues to operate as an
independent business unit within the Maxar organization.
This document was cleared by DARPA on May 14, 2019. Approved for Public
Release, Distribution Unlimited.
About Maxar Technologies
As a global leader of advanced space technology solutions, Maxar is at
the nexus of the new space economy, developing and sustaining the
infrastructure and delivering the information, services, and systems
that unlock the promise of space for commercial and government markets.
The operations of DigitalGlobe, SSL and Radiant Solutions were unified
under the Maxar brand in February; MDA continues to operate as an
independent business unit within the Maxar organization. As a trusted
partner with 5,900 employees in over 30 global locations, Maxar provides
vertically integrated capabilities and expertise including satellites,
Earth imagery, robotics, geospatial data and analytics to help customers
anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges
with confidence. Every day, billions of people rely on Maxar to
communicate, share information and data, and deliver insights that Build
a Better World. Maxar trades on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto
Stock Exchange as MAXR. For more information, visit www.maxar.com.
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