Science

ICEYE-X56

Commercial X-band SAR Imaging · ICEYE (Finland)

ICEYE-X56, one of the Finnish company's commercial synthetic aperture radar satellites — spacecraft that fire their own microwave pulses at Earth and read the echo, producing usable imagery regardless of cloud cover, smoke, or total darkness. This satellite is part of the Finnish company's push toward sub-daily global revisit, the operational threshold that makes persistent monitoring — not just occasional snapshots — commercially possible. ICEYE has grown from a single 100 kg proof-of-concept in 2018 into the world's largest commercial SAR operator, raising over €1 billion at a €10 billion valuation along the way.