Maritime Situational Awareness Task Order Awarded to Ursa Space
Maritime Situational Awareness Task Order Awarded to Ursa Space
U.S. Space Force Targets Illegal Fishing
A U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC) task order in support of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has been awarded to Ursa Space Systems. This task order, requested by SSC’s Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Tracking (SRT) Cell, provided situational awareness to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, a pervasive global maritime security threat. The exercise marks the first combined effort between Ursa Space and the two entities.
“Ursa’s satellite orchestration and analysis helped us demonstrate that tools like SRT can drive a timeline for planning items from weeks down to hours thanks to the speed of commercial solutions."
Lieutenant Colonel Vinny Pande
SOUTHCOM is one of 11 unified Combatant Commands (COCOMs) in the Department of Defense. The command is responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation in its assigned area of responsibility (AOR), which include Central America, South America, and The Caribbean. SOUTHCOM’s AOR includes 31 countries and approximately ⅙ of the world’s landmass assigned to regional unified commands.
This delivery was conducted in tandem with SOUTHCOM’s Resolute Sentinel exercise, which was held in Peru to integrate combat interoperability and disaster response training. Ursa Space provided an Operational Planning Product (OPP) in support of the exercise. OPPs are commercially generated products that are unclassified and answer operational questions generated by the Combatant Commands.
Ursa Space leverages the world’s most comprehensive and progressive virtual constellation from multiple commercial sources and advanced data fusion capabilities. Ursa’s platform orchestrates satellite imagery and analytic services at scale, to rapidly deliver insights to customers when needed. As of this announcement, Ursa’s archive catalog exceeds 42 million data records, with access to 22 of the industry’s most trusted satellite imagery providers for new tasking.
Ursa was able to demonstrate rapid delivery with a limited imaging window of 24 hours and one day’s notice to schedule the tasking, despite the potential for reduced viable space assets due to each vendors’ unique orbit pattern and tasking requirements. As successfully demonstrated, Ursa’s virtual constellation of robust and diverse satellite architectures maximized the probability for successful collection.
Ursa Space’s differentiated, deep SAR processing expertise supports advanced analytics with the ability to use data from further up the vendor processing chain. For this exercise, Ursa’s fused Automatic Identification System (AIS) data with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-based vessel detections to allow for optimized, higher resolution tasking, and to also track and report on suspicious vessels in the area.
“Our mission at Ursa is to provide a resilient, robust, and accurate set of insights,” said George Flick, vice president of Ursa’s U.S. Government department. “These insights must not only meet our customers’ requirements, but exceed them. We’re grateful to Space Force for shepherding this opportunity, and to SOUTHCOM for trusting our integrated operational planning solution.”
“Ursa’s rapid response and data fusion capabilities allowed this Capstone to mimic near-real time operations,” said Lieutenant Colonel Vinny Pande, Branch Chief of the Persistent Tactical Surveillance Branch within SSC’s Space Sensing program executive office. “Ursa’s satellite orchestration and analysis helped us demonstrate that tools like SRT can drive a timeline for planning items from weeks down to hours thanks to the speed of commercial solutions. Without commercially-sourced analytics products like Ursa’s, we likely would not have been able to share information with the exercise’s partner nations, making the information far less valuable.”