Science

QPS-SAR-8 (AMATERU-IV)

SAR imaging · iQPS (Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space)

In January 2024, an earthquake cut off Japan's Noto Peninsula from the outside world—roads gone, access impossible, and no way to see the damage from the ground. A tiny Japanese startup filled the gap from orbit within days. QPS-SAR-8, nicknamed AMATERU-IV after the Shinto sun goddess, is the eighth satellite from iQPS, a company whose signature trick is a deployable 3.6-meter mesh radar antenna that folds down small enough to fly on a satellite one-twentieth the weight and one-hundredth the cost of a traditional SAR spacecraft. Launched August 16, 2024 on Transporter-11, AMATERU-IV reached sun-synchronous orbit and returned its first stripmap and spotlight radar images within about a month, eventually achieving resolution down to 46 centimeters. iQPS is racing toward a 24-satellite constellation by 2027 and 36 eventually, aiming for a near-real-time service that can revisit almost any point on Earth every ten minutes—the kind of persistent coverage that turned disaster response from a days-long wait into same-day imagery during the Noto earthquake.