Silicon Valley is investing $19 million in space radar

Sept 29, 2018
In November, Capella Space will launch their SAR sensor on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Radar satellites like Capella’s and ICEYE’s promise to defeat two key limits on passive imaging satellites like those flown by Planet, DigitalGlobe, or Airbus: Those satellites need sunlight and can’t see through cloud-cover. And radar satellites need enough power to transmit radio energy down to earth, requiring powerful batteries and efficient solar panels. “SAR is actual high-hanging fruit,” Boshuizen (Capella Space’s CEO) says. “The gap from passive optical sensing to active radar sensing is quite large.”
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