It claims to be the first SAR satellite provider to achieve wide-area Scan mode imaging, with the persistent monitoring capabilities now commercially available.
ICEYE says the new Scan imaging is particularly effective for acquiring wide coverage imagery for maritime use cases – where national authorities and maritime safety officials require persistent visibility over large sea areas. Radar satellite imaging works both day and night, and also through cloud cover.
“Our leading-edge persistent monitoring capabilities, now boosted with Scan mode, enable our commercial and government customers to quickly and effortlessly survey huge areas for purposes such as sea ice monitoring, ensuring maritime safety and national security use cases,” said Steve Young, Vice President, Business Development and Sales, ICEYE. “Our unique satellite constellation and technology approach makes ICEYE’s capability something alternative approaches simply aren’t able to match.”
Pictured above (left) is an ICEYE demonstration of 400 km by 100 km Scan mode imaging, acquired around the time the vessel Ever Given was released from its Suez Canal predicament, with marine traffic still queuing for their turn to pass through. The 40,000 km² image covers an area of over 1500 individual Spot images.
“We’ve done trials to Scan image areas as large as 100 km x 400 km (60 x 250 miles) with a single acquisition, covering areas at once that would take more than 1500 Spot images as a comparison,” said Pekka Laurila, CSO & Co-founder, ICEYE. “ICEYE continues to lead the way with several world first technology innovations for the benefit of our customers, as we have continually done since we launched the world’s first New Space SAR satellite over 3 years ago.”
The two show the difference between Strip (medium area, left) and Spot (detail area, right) imaging in terms of their coverage.
25cm
An in-orbit demonstration from ICEYE radar imaging satellites showed off the new capability, which addressed the “Earth observation market”.
According to the company – following standard industry definitions – the native slant plane resolution of the SAR data is 25 cm in the azimuth direction, and 50 cm in the range direction, before ground-plane adjustments are applied.
The data is accessible with standard Geographic Information System (GIS) tools.
Image: Iceeye
See also: ICEYE opens spacecraft production facility in California