Portable satellite imagery ground systems to be delivered to U.S. Army
NewsSeptember 22, 2020
WESTMINSTER, Colo. Maxar Technologies, company specializing in Earth Intelligence and Space Infrastructure, announced that it has been selected by the U.S. Army Geospatial Center to deliver multiple highly portable, direct-downlink tactical ground systems intended to provide critical geospatial intelligence to users in remote locations.
According to the company, Maxar was awarded a sole-source, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract valued at up to $49 million over eight years and two initial task orders worth a combined value of $8 million.
The system, called the U.S. Army Remote Ground Terminal (RGT), is designed to be easily transported by two people and set-up in about an hour. The RGT aims to enable troops in remote locations to rapidly downlink, analyze, and disseminate data from commercial Earth observation satellites to support military, humanitarian, and disaster relief missions. The RGT system is based on Maxar’s Tactical Architecture for Near-real-time Global Operations (TANGOTM) platform, the company claims.
The RGT downlinks data from a variety of commercial sources, including Maxar’s high-resolution WorldView constellation, and is designed to be continuously upgraded with additional commercial electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar sources.
The company also claims that the U.S. Army plans to continue developing the RGT system, ultimately transitioning it to become the commercial imagery receive node for the U.S. Army’s future Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN). TITAN is a scalable intelligence ground station that will leverage sensors across multiple domains to provide rapid and accurate targeting data directly to U.S. Army fires networks.
