Satnews Daily
September 21st, 2009

Valiant Angel Becomes Extremely Visible For Lockheed Martin


The U.S. Joint Forces Command awarded a Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] team a $29 million contract for Valiant Angel, a new system that will apply highly advanced broadcasting technologies to help commanders collect, manage, process, exploit and disseminate full-motion video. The system will give commanders better visibility into the vast amounts of real-time and archived video, which is collected from manned and unmanned aircraft and ground-based sensors.

Lockheed Martin's Audacity page Under the contract, a team comprised of Lockheed Martin, Harris Corporation [NYSE:HRS] and NetApp will design and integrate a new system to manage the video processing, exploitation and dissemination cycle. Valiant Angel will deliver a number of new capabilities to the warfighter. The system will collect and store incoming video streams from a variety of sensors in a secure, networked database — categorize and manage videos by keyword, geographic region or other items of interest — fuse intelligence data from multiple sources into incoming video streams.

The Valiant Angel system will incorporate tools and technologies from two existing systems: Lockheed Martin’s Audacity™ video analysis system, and Harris Corporation’s Full-Motion Video Asset Management System, or FAME™. The two companies previously integrated the tools together under a collaborative research and development agreement, announced in April. NetApp will integrate their Data ONTAP high-capacity storage technology with the Valiant Angel system.  Data ONTAP is a flexible, high-performance storage architecture that can scale to 24 servers with a total of 14 petabytes of capacity.