This announcement is a pre-solicitation synopsis and is not seeking proposals.  This pending Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) is a follow-on BAA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGAs) Boosting Innovative GEOINT BAA (BIG BAA, HM0476-16-BAA-0001) that effectively ended for new Topic posting on 07 December 2018.  This pre-solicitation announcement was also previously publicized under HM0476-19-BAA-0001.  It is presently anticipated that the general BAA solicitation and the first topic seeking abstracts/proposals will be published before 31 July 2020. 

The mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Research(R) is to provide research solutions that enable the future of Geospatial-Intelligence (GEOINT). NGA-R applies innovative science and technology to create tactical and strategic mission advantage to support GEOINT superiority.

In support of this mission, the Boosting Innovative Geospatial-Intelligence (GEOINT) Research Broad Agency Announcement (BIG-R BAA, HM0476-20-BAA-0001) invites proposers to submit innovative basic or applied research concepts that address one or more of the following technical domains: (1) Foundational GEOINT, (2) Advanced Phenomenologies, and (3) Analytic Technologies.  Each of these domains is described below.  Specific topic areas associated with these technical domains will be posted as Amendments throughout the open period of this Announcement.  Appendixes will be added to address Amendment information.  Each posted topic area will have specific timelines for abstract and proposal submission.  Examples of potential topics included in each technical domain are below.  Abstracts and proposals submitted in response to this BAA must investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances.  NGA-Research is explicitly not interested in approaches or technologies that primarily result in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

Foundational GEOINT.  Accurate, high resolution, continually updated representations of the earth’s properties, on demand.  This research includes innovations in the areas of Terrestrial/Celestial Reference Frames, Gravity, Magnetics, Feature Extraction/attribution, Terrestrial/bathymetric models, and Infrastructure models.

Advanced Phenomenologies.  Novel methods and efficient strategies to drive development and delivery of spatio-temporal data from an increasing number of traditional and non-traditional sources. This research includes innovation in: Sensing; Positioning; Navigation and Timing (PNT) resilience; Novel Source Exploitation; Space Situational Awareness; and Information Assurance.

Analytic Technologies.  Accurate, timely, reliable and scalable methods for data exploitation and analysis driven by new data sources and types and emerging threats and mission domains.  This research includes innovation in: Automatic Target Recognition; Geospatial Signatures; Geopositioning; Tracking, Hypersonics; Adversarial activity; Image/video understanding; Counter Proliferation and Chemical; Biological; Radiological; Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE); Water Security; Artificial Intelligence and Automation Software Tools; and Workflow Effectiveness.