Science

ICEYE-X72

Commercial X-band SAR Imaging · ICEYE (Finland)

ICEYE-X72, 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 flying alongside dozens of sister satellites in a mesh of overlapping orbital planes designed to minimize the time between successive images of any single point on Earth. 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.