ICEYE’s MICRO-SATELLITE SAR CONSTELLATION: NEAR-REAL TIME SATELLITE DATA FOR EARTH OBSERVATION

Small satellites have paved the ground for new opportunities aiming to understand the Earth’s surface processes and bring new services to EO community. The first wave of new, smaller EO satellites were built by private sector to enable real-time imaging with optical instruments; however, microwave remote sensing has been following rapidly the same development. New instruments provide already significantly improved monitoring capability, as microwave data can be acquired in nearly all weather, lighting and seasonal conditions, including during polar night and constant cloud cover.

In the beginning of 2018, the Finnish Earth Observation company ICEYE demonstrated feasibility of the first commercial SAR micro-satellite, ICEYE-X1, with successful stripmap-imaging results. In December 2018, the second satellite ICEYE-X2 was launched successfully, imaging with a resolution of 3x3 meters.

Over the next 3 years, ICEYE’s goal is to build the world’s first and largest commercial constellation of SAR micro-satellites, i.e. 18 SAR micro-satellites by the end of 2020, providing access to timely and reliable radar images up to tens of accesses per day at any location on Earth. High temporal resolution data will assist on Earth’s real-time monitoring, introduce novel approaches and services, and complementing the already existing well-established methods.

Here, we show the potential of imagery acquired by the ICEYE-X1 & X2 sensors in several EO application scenarios, focusing on change detection methodologies. We concentrate on several potential applications such as urban, agricultural, hazards, forest monitoring, and vessel tracking.

Novel technological advances in the form of near-real-time data provided by ICEYE’s future constellations will lead to possibility of continuous high-revisit monitoring for wide areas and hence support decision-makers to plan and respond faster.