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Small satellites begin to offer unrivaled detail in radar images of Earth

A Finnish company named ICEYE that is building a constellation of satellites to create synthetic images of the Earth's surface says it has taken the first sub-1 meter resolution photos of the planet with a small satellite. The images show significant detail of crude oil being loaded onto and off of tankers.

According to ICEYE co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Pekka Laurila, since its founding in 2015 ICEYE has raised about $65 million, expanded to 120 employees, and most recently has launched three of its mini-refrigerator-sized satellites into low-Earth orbit.

For the first three years ICEYE focused on technology development, and its first payload launch occurred in January 2018 on board India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Since then ICEYE has launched two more satellites and plans to add another two by the end of this year. "It is fair to say that we are moving into commercial operations, and the scope of those commercial services are rapidly increasing," Laurila said in an interview with Ars.

In contrast to the optical instruments used by most of the existing Earth-focused imaging satellites, ICEYE uses synthetic-aperture radar technology. Its 100kg satellites use the motion of a radar antenna, combined with the time the device travels over a target, to create multi-dimensional images of the surface even through clouds, during day or night. The "synthetic" part of the antenna is due to the fact that a small antenna moving over a large distance can effectively mimic the resolution of a much larger antenna.

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