Espoo, Finland-based ICEYE, a spacetech startup that delivers persistent monitoring capabilities for any location on earth, announced on Wednesday that it has successfully launched five new SAR satellites into orbit. All the satellites were launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 smallsat rideshare mission via EXOLAUNCH from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is a US-based space manufacturer, a provider of space transportation services, and a communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk.
ICEYE has confirmed that communication with each satellite has been successfully established. With this development, ICEYE and ICEYE US have now deployed 21 satellites since 2018, including both commercial and dedicated customer missions.
Satellite imaging to save lives
The Finnish spacetech startup claims that its constellation is designed to provide customers with reliable and frequent imagery, enabling the rapid detection and tracking of changes on the Earth’s surface, regardless of the time of day or weather conditions. This capability is ideally suited for applications such as insurance loss adjustment, natural catastrophe response and recovery, national security, humanitarian relief, and climate change monitoring.
The current launch also included the second and third satellites built, licensed and operated by ICEYE US. ICEYE US, a subsidiary of ICEYE, established a satellite manufacturing facility early last year at its headquarters in Irvine, California.
Jerry Welsh, CEO of ICEYE US, says, “Expanding our fleet of US-built satellites is a critical step that expands our capability to support our customers across the US Government. We are seeing a shift in the US and international government sector that is now looking to fully leverage and integrate commercial remote sensing technologies into their collection architectures.”
Who will operate the newly launched satellites?
The ICEYE US satellites, licensed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will be operated and controlled exclusively from the company’s Mission Operations Center in Irvine.
Two of the satellites are provided directly to the Brazilian Air Force. The Air Force will operate the satellites in support of environmental and national security objectives. Due to Brazil’s cloudy weather, SAR satellites that can image the earth during the night or through clouds have an important advantage in gathering actionable insights.
Later this year, ICEYE plans on adding up to five additional satellites to its constellation, including more satellites manufactured by ICEYE US.
About ICEYE
Founded in 2015 by Pekka Laurila and Rafal Modrzewski, ICEYE builds and operates its own commercial constellation of radar imaging satellites with Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data. It designs, manufactures, and operates the SAR satellites in-house, with manufacturing timelines brought down to a few months.
According to NASA, SAR is a type of active data collection where a sensor produces its own energy and then records the amount of energy reflected back after interacting with the Earth.
Earlier in February, the Helsinki-based startup raised $136M in a Series D round to grow its Natural Catastrophe solutions offering, and to further develop its satellite constellation and technology to reduce the time needed to access and increase the visiting frequency of its satellites.
Prior to that, the company had raised €74M in its Series C round in September, 2020.
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