Capella's sub-meter X-band SAR constellation

Abstract:

The number and variety of applications that exploit Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are growing. These applications include environmental monitoring, surveillance, emergency response, infrastructure monitoring, urban planning, and food security. With the growing demand for SAR images, the community of SAR users is also transforming. Radar images are now processed by GIS users, software developers, and computer vision and machine learning engineers, and are increasingly interpreted by non-radar specialists. This increased popularity of SAR data is in part due to increased availability of computational and storage capability thanks to services like AWS but also partially because of new capabilities coming online such as Capella’s constellation of high resolution SAR satellites. Over the next few years we will be witnessing a substantial increase in availability of commercial X-band SAR data along with a complete modernization of how we interact with imagery providers including real-time tasking, fully cloud-based and API-based automated scheduling and delivery which will result in exciting new ways of digesting the data and utilizing geospatial information across many more sectors.