Chinese startup Spacety began releasing imagery captured by Hisea-1, a 185-kilogram C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, launched in December on a Long March 8 rocket.
Three days after launch, Spacety began receiving data from Hisea-1’s SAR payload built by the China Electronics Technology Group. On Dec. 27, Spacety acquired its first batch of SAR imagery including a three-meter-resolution image of Tennessee published in a Dec. 30 news release. Hisea-1, “the world’s first commercial C-band small satellite SAR with a phased-array antenna.”
Spacety is developing and deploying a unique SAR constellation with both C-band and X-band radar. This constellation will provide real-time imagery of every point on Earth day and night, rain or shine. The dual-band SAR constellation has very short revisit time and will enable many new applications not possible with single frequency band SAR data.