Finnish SAR satellite manufacturer ICEYE today announced an agreement with Kongsberg Satellite Service to purchase synthetic aperture radar satellite tasking and data from ICEYE.
The maritime and ice monitoring data is collected with ICEYE’s first satellite in orbit, which was successfully launched in January.
“ICEYE was initially started with a focus on actively monitoring changes in sea ice and maritime environments as a whole,” said Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and co-founder of ICEYE.
“We’ve evolved to support many different industries with our earth observation data services. Working alongside KSAT, another fellow Nordic company, we are excited to provide the company with greater visibility into their areas of interest, and together push the envelope forward for ice and maritime monitoring.”
Norway-based KSAT is a provider of global ground station and Earth observation services. With unique polar ground stations in the Arctic and in Antarctica, the company operates more than 130 antennas in an interconnected network for access to polar orbits. KSAT currently supports more than 100 satellite missions, including ICEYE-X1, with ground station services.
“As a world leading provider of near real-time information services KSAT is generally interested in any new SAR mission to support the evolving user requirements. We see the ICEYE mission as an interesting contribution to complement our existing portfolio of multi-mission SAR based services”, says Jan Petter Pedersen, Senior Vice President at KSAT.
ICEYE aims to provide access to reliable earth observation data through developing efficient SAR sensors and microsatellites. ICEYE is the first organization in the world that has successfully launched SAR microsatellites. It commenced its commercial data operations in the first half of 2018.
ICEYE is planning to launch at least two additional missions throughout the remainder of 2018.
Read our story on ICEYE here.
Photo: Sea ice between Helsinki and Tallin, photographed from ICEYE-X1.