Expedited Commercial Imagery Delivery through Reduced Ground Processing Time

For commercial satellite imagery to be tactically relevant for the warfighter, the Navy needs shorter timelines from tasking to exploitation of these commercial datasets. The proposed Phase 2 effort is research, development, testing, and evaluation of a prototype capability that would enable Umbra to demonstrate an ability to achieve sub-minute edge node processing times when measured from completion of a downlink to an exploitable image.  All of the technical objectives in the Phase 2 base and option periods are research, development, testing, or evaluation of capabilities that will reduce the latency in the overall tasking to exploitation timeline. These objectives are focused for Umbra to develop capabilities that run on local hardware at the edge node location and latency reduction processing that occurs on-orbit before direct downlink. The Phase 2 will culminate in on-orbit demonstrations of direct downlinks from Umbra commercial satellites to MTC relevant sites on timelines from tasking to exploitation that are tactically relevant for the warfighter.  The Phase 2 program will develop, test, and evaluate latency reductions across sub-components of the Umbra system. Umbra will initiate development of the latency reduction recommendations from the Phase 1 effort. This includes developing streamed preprocessing, parallel compute instances, native language performance optimizations and hardware acceleration for Umbra's containerized end-to-end decryption and image product formation pipeline, called Ark, which is deployable to partner and customer tactical processing locations. All of these development efforts can contribute to a potential for a sub-minute post-downlink image access time. Additionally, scheduling optimization options for bundling, sorting, or prioritizing images will be developed that can maximize the time available to both image and downlink in-theater, in the same overpass. The Phase 2 program will also take on additional research and development to reduce latency through three additional parts of the Umbra system:(A) developing low latency access to the Umbra commercial system for the Navy with dynamic tasking, (B) developing on-orbit processing prior to downlink, (C) developing additional downlink paths for data processed on-orbit.  The latency between image collection and exploitable intelligence must be reduced to the smallest possible timelines to maximize its value to the United States Navy. The objective of this program is to demonstrate Umbra’s ability to meet these needs and integrate into the MTC architecture through modifications to the existing Umbra processes and technologies for our commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation.