This week, Helsinki-based, venture capital-funded satellite telecommunications company ICEYE, which provides continuous radar monitoring services for government and industrial clients, announced a major technology breakthrough. The company says it is the first in the world to achieve Daily Coherent Ground Track Repeat (GTR) imaging using its own radar satellites.
This breakthrough enables the detection of large changes in the movement of large assets (like ships) to very detailed on-ground changes that would be unrecognizable to on-site human eyes. The generated images are then fed into a dataset that can be used to assemble Coherent Change Detection (CCD) every 24 hours. This capability has myriad use cases, including detailed monitoring of patterns of life, site activity, ground subsidence, infrastructure integrity, and construction. ICEYE plans to roll out this capability to its broader customer base in 2022, following an initial early access period.
“ICEYE has spent the last three years actively pursuing this revolutionary capability for our customers, as it provides an unparalleled basis for performing change detection,” ICEYE CEO and Co-Founder Rafal Modrzewski said. “This is a completely new level of performance. It enables four times more frequent persistent monitoring with radar satellites than has ever been available before.”
The company explained that “coherence” is the term of art describing exact similarity between two radar satellite images. If a car has driven across a field, stockpiles have been adjusted, or forested areas have been cut down, these are seen as changes in the coherence between the chosen two images.
ICEYE’s Daily Coherent GTR technology allows small changes at an individual location to be determined very quickly on a consistent daily basis, and at high resolution. This is due to the successful orbit adjustment of ICEYE’s satellites, which allow the same locations on Earth to be imaged from exactly the same orbit placement every 24 hours.
“The ability to image the same area at the same angle each day creates new opportunities for detecting daily changes that were not previously possible. By overlaying stacks of daily images, it is now possible to rapidly determine if objects have moved or entered the scene,” said Jerry Welsh, CEO of ICEYE’s U.S. subsidiary. “For example, we can monitor activities at a port and quickly identify changes, whether it’s commodities sitting on the docks or ships in the harbor.”
Welsh said the technology had been previewed by some of iCEYE’s U.S. customers, and described their response as “amazing.”
Last week, ICEYE launched four more synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellites with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 smallsat rideshare mission, bringing the total number of the company’s radar satellite missions launched to 14. One of the newest spacecraft is a next-generation demonstration mission, which is set to double the effective resolution of ICEYE’s proprietary imaging instrument, while the other three satellites are set to deliver data to customers with flight-proven technology after commissioning is finalized.
“If you need to know what is happening in the world, ICEYE is your choice for persistent monitoring,” CEO Modrzewski said in connection with last week’s launch.
ICEYE is a privately held company whose backers include government entities such as Business Finland (Tekes) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program / SME Instrument. ICEYE has also secured financing via private venture capital, from firms such as Silicon Valley early-stage VC True Ventures, Finnish early-stage VC Lifeline Ventures, Luxembourg space private equity fund NewSpace Capital, and others.
