Planet Labs signed a contract with the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (that) for the amount $12,8 million for the supply of data and analytics, that will support the monitoring of maritime activities in the Asia-Pacific region.
As part of the project, Planet will cooperate with SynMax Intelligence, an American company, specializing in geoanalytics. Data from Planet satellites, which daily cover over 25 million km² of ocean surface, will be integrated with SynMax's Theia analytics platform. This system uses AI to detect vessels, that carry out illegal fishing, illegal transshipments on the high seas and AIS signal spoofing, when ships deliberately conceal their location.
The contract is implemented within the Luno B routine, which involves implementing commercial AI tools directly into NGA workflows. The total cost of the Luno program is $490 million and covers two directions:
- Luna A — analytical services based on machine learning and computer vision;
- Luno B — integration of commercial AI solutions into the agency's internal analytics.
Planet Labs is listed as the leading data and analytics provider for Luno alongside Vantor (formerly Maxar Intelligence), BlackSky, Ursa Space and NV5 Geospatial.
The company has a constellation of approx 140 satellites, which remove the entire surface of the Earth every day - more than 200 million km² of land, coasts and water spaces. This scale of observation forms a unique data archive, which supports the training of artificial intelligence models for automated detection of changes and events on a global scale.
With this agreement, Planet Labs strengthens its presence in the maritime situational awareness sector, which is becoming increasingly important to national security. The collaboration with NGA also underscores the growing integration of commercial space companies into the work of US intelligence agencies, which increasingly rely on private satellite systems for global monitoring.
Source: https://spacenews.com