The National Reconnaissance Office today announced the transition of the Planet commercial imagery subscription service from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to NRO.

As part of the transition, the NRO awarded Planet an unclassified, multi-year subscription service contract for daily, large-area, 3-5 meter resolution commercial imagery collection.

Recognizing the importance of mission continuity, the scope of the new NRO contract is comparable to NGA’s previous contracts with Planet and includes access to new daily unclassified imagery over multiple areas of interest to military planners, warfighters, and the national security community.

The transition is consistent with NGA’s and NRO’s role in exploring new and viable commercial GEOINT opportunities for national security missions.

“With its large constellation of satellites, Planet can image country—and even continent-sized areas—every day,” said Pete Muend, director of NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. “This capability to provide daily revisit over large areas of the Earth gives analysts unparalleled opportunities to discover and monitor activity for a wide range of applications.”

“The NRO is committed to ensuring NGA and its customers continue to have access to Planet imagery to perform the vital analysis needed to create value-added geospatial products for our partners and policy makers,” said Muend.

“NGA’s 2016 Planet subscription played a role in our analytic transformation, where we are now focused less on pixels and more on information content and services,” said David Gauthier, director of NGA’s Source Commercial and Business Operations Group.

Gauthier said Planet imagery demonstrated the value that daily revisit of large areas, at 3-5 meter resolutions, to several mission areas — especially when combined with geospatial analytics.

“With this transition, NGA can continue to shift its focus to emerging commercial GEOINT products and services that uniquely support our user community,” said Gauthier.