The French defense procurement agency DGA awarded a $35 million contract to EADS Defense & Security and Thales to produce and support two sets of deployable geographic modules.

EADS DS, as a prime contractor in cooperation with Thales, will develop the MGPs for the 28th Geographic Group of the French army.

The MGPs will allow the updating of field maps through a single cartographic access point by troops deployed on a mission or in the field, a statement by EADS said. It will complement the 3-D digital geographical data program developed in France for mass production of geographical information.

Similarly, MGPs will supply specialized support for decision-making by senior commanding generals.

Several autonomous modules can be deployed to different locations in a theater of operation and will collect geographical information that will be synchronized and verified to produce fully updated maps.

The project is the missing link between the production of geographical reference data in France and the end-users in-theater, particularly the operational command information systems, said Pascale Sourisse, Thales senior vice president in charge of C4I systems for defense and security. "This entire chain, from data acquisition to data utilization in the forces, contributes to global information control, which is one of the major issues for the armed forces staff."

EADS and Thales also will work with Magellium, a high-tech, small-to-medium size enterprise in Ramonville Saint-Agne near Toulouse. Magellium bought the defense business of Generale d'Infographie, based near Paris, in March 2008.

The acquisition strengthened Magellium's position in the defense sector, a company statement said at the time. Magellium's workforce was boosted to more than 110 employees and the group's turnover was around $18.5 million for 2009.

Also working with EADS and Thales will be GEO 212 on the image-processing and geomatics and Euro Shelter for its mobile technical shelter knowledge.

DS and Thales will provide operational support for an initial period of six years after the completion of the production phase.

The companies are expected to deliver a prototype by the end of 2010, while a complete MGP module is scheduled to be operational with the NATO response force in 2012.

The completed system will interconnect with the network of the Federation of French Army information and communications systems.

Geomatics, first investigated in the late 1960s, is the discipline of gathering, storing, processing and delivering geographic information or spatially referenced information. The name comes from the combination of geodesy and geo-informatics terms. It includes the tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, cartography, global navigation satellite systems, photogrammetry and related earth mapping exercises.