MDA announced today that ICEYE would be providing the first X-band satellite for the company’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) CHORUS constellation announced yesterday.
SpaceQ first wrote about the SAR startup ICEYE in 2018 and interviewed Pekka Laurila, the CFO at the time, now Chief Strategy Officer. The Finnish based company has shown a remarkable ability and agility in innovating in the SAR space and has been able to garner some important contracts globally including with financial-risk giant AON, and in the U.S. with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the U.S. Army among others. The company closed its Series C round of funding in September of 2020 raising US$87 million.
Today’s announcement answers the question we had for MDA yesterday with regard to how RADARSAT-2 would fit in with the CHORUS constellation.
Along with supplying an X-band spacecraft for the CHORUS constellation, ICEYE and MDA have entered into a distribution agreement. That agreement benefits both companies immediately as MDA will sell existing ICEYE X-band data “to select RADARSAT-2 customers” and MDA will be able “to develop value-added products to immediately take advantage of advanced information data integration and analytics from these two types of SAR sensors.”
MDA CEO Mike Greeley in Paris for the World Satellite Business Week took to Twitter to share the details of the CHORUS constellation and ICEYE agreement.
Our CEO @MGreenley shares details on CHORUS, MDA's next generation commercial Earth observation mission, and our new agreement with @iceyefi to integrate an X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite into the constellation. #MissionMDA #WSBW pic.twitter.com/zdIsnksQ8M — MDA (@MDA_space) December 15, 2021
The company also released the following image of Paris showcasing RADARSAT-2 and ICEYE data.
MDA also provided additional details on the CHORUS constellation today.
- Designed with a focus on maritime surveillance applications, CHORUS will have dedicated vessel detection imaging modes with an imaging capacity to collect an area equal to 40% of the global Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) – or over 55 million square kilometres – every day using the 25m Vessel Detection Mode.
- CHORUS will enable a new level of precision all-weather satellite monitoring of icebergs in the North Atlantic. This is currently achieved by crewed aircraft observations supplemented with Earth observation satellite imagery.
- The mission will enable tipping and cueing operations between wide area surveillance to high-resolution point target monitoring. This unique capability is especially useful, when fused with space-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, for use cases such as broad area ship detection and vessel classification to support dark vessel detection activities.