The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s intelligence directorate said last week that imagery from a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite built by Finland-based ICEYE helped sink the Russian amphibious assault ship Minsk and the Russian submarine Rostov-on-Don in the Crimea’s Sevastopol Bay on Sept. 13.
The directorate has deemed the SAR bird the “People’s Satellite”–“narodni suputnik,” as Ukraine’s Serhiy Prytula Charitable Foundation raised $16 million in three days through crowdsourcing to buy imagery from ICEYE on Aug. 18 last year.
The directorate said that it has had access to the radar satellite imagery since Sept. 20 of last year.
Ukraine’s RPC news agency said that the charitable foundation was initially raising funds to buy Turkish Bayraktar drones from Turkey’s Baykar Tech until the latter “announced that it would provide Ukraine with drones for free.”
On March 1 last year–eight days after Russia’s second assault on Ukraine since 2014, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov wrote an open letter to Planet Labs PBC [PL], Maxar Technologies [MAXR], Airbus, South Korea’s SI Imaging Services, BlackSky Technology [BKSY], ICEYE, NASA’s ViewSpace, and Capella Space–to request satellite imagery, especially from SAR.
“We badly need the opportunity to watch the movement of Russian troops, especially at night when our technologies are blind in fact!” Fedorov wrote at the time. “SAR satellite data is important to understanding Russian troop and vehicles movements at night considering that clouds cover about 80 percent of Ukraine during the day.”
“This is really the first major war in which commercially available satellite imagery may play a significant role in providing open source information about troops movements, military buildups in neighboring countries, flows of refugees and more,” according to Fedorov’s letter .
Ukrainian Air Force General Lieutenant Mykola Oleshchuk suggested in a Telegram post on Sept. 15 that Ukraine has two kinds of allied cruise missiles that the nation may have used to sink Rostov-on-Don and the Minsk.
“We hang British Storm Shadow under the left wing of the Su-24M [fighter] and French SCALP under the right,” he wrote. “Both missiles work excellently, leaving no chances for the occupier!”
MBDA makes the Storm Shadow and Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée (SCALP).
While ICEYE maintains control of its 27 SAR satellites, each in a low Earth orbit about 350 miles above Earth, corporations, non-profits, and governments are able to buy imagery from the 220-pound satellites. Large customers of ICEYE imagery so far have included the Australian government, McKinsey Intelligence Services, Eigen Risk, Tokio Marine, and Aon PLC, which are using the data to map wildfires and floods and other natural catastrophes.
ICEYE has leveraged SAR data from Ukraine to develop its Dwell imaging mode which focuses on a single point on the ground for 25 seconds, rather than the usual 10 seconds for ICEYE’s Spot images.
Because of Dwell’s longer imaging duration, analysts may be able to determine the distributions and movements of armored vehicles, particularly in areas of tree canopies. The Dwell mode is to allow imagery collection and dissemination not possible with conventional SAR imaging techniques.