"This is a level of persistent information that the planet has never seen before."

A key requirement that’s been missing from Earth observation is being able to track changes very quickly and very often. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) allows you to see in any weather, day or night. But if you want to be able to track changes to any location on the globe in minutes, hours, or a few days, you need a constellation of satellites that are small and affordable enough to enable persistent monitoring that can be quickly activated, flexibly maneuvered and that can deliver the right information at the right time. That’s exactly what ICEYE does.

To me, it’s like how detectives worked in the 20th century. With traditional police work, you go around and talk to people and look at things. Then amazing scientific inventions like fingerprinting and DNA analysis came along and allowed us to suddenly understand much more than meets the eye. Until now we’ve been looking at things on the ground and trying to understand what we’re seeing. With radar, we can exploit things that change over time or frequency. By using the computer to compare microphase changes within the image pixels, we can identify changes between observations and beyond human sight. It’s an almost forensic level of persistent information that’s unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

If we’re able to image a location on the planet from a very precise imaging geometry within very short intervals, we can compare the image data and the raw phase information inside the information to unlock unprecedented levels of scientific information. And that’s what ICEYE is doing by delivering Daily Coherent Ground Track Repeat capability. The trick is enabling a satellite to image a location on Earth every day from the same imaging geometry.

There’s an amazing balance of physics where the amount of time it takes a satellite to go around the Earth is a function of its altitude. ICEYE’s ion engines gives us the phenomenal capability to adjust the altitude so that each satellite orbits the Earth exactly 15 times in 24 hours. So an ICEYE satellite can image the exact same point on the ground every day – rain or shine, day and night. And because our satellites are less than 100 kg, we’re able to have many of them doing Daily Coherent Ground Track Repeats of the same locations across the globe. This enables a level of scientific data exploitation that’s never been possible.