This is great to see from ICEYE. Not only have they gone from only a handful of sample images to now over 200, but they've also licensed it openly under CC BY 4.0, which is a huge deal.
I work at Umbra, another SAR company. Even though ICEYE is flying roughly 10 times more satellites on orbit than we are, we have released over 10x more open data (pacing toward over 100x this year at the rate we're both going).
I don't know why Umbra releases so much more open data than ICEYE. But if I had to guess:
1. Umbra is committed to growing the adoption of SAR and supporting research to make it more useful, and ICEYE is not. We think of our open data as a resource for the broader research community; ICEYE views it as an advertisement.
2. We have nothing to hide, and they do. The more data ICEYE releases, the more obvious it becomes how many of their satellites are not actually working (still flying, though!) as well as making it easy to compare apples-to-apples performance with their competition (something they dutifully avoid when possible).
3. Their satellites do not capture much imagery, relatively. While the gap is not 10x per satellite, it's large. When a single high-demand region takes all of your duty cycle to collect, you don't have discretionary capacity left to capture for your open data initiative.
Overall, I'd give them a C or C+ up from a failing grade. Progress.
From my casual glance, I can see only few images of particular spots and no timeline so that you can go back in history. Seems pretty rudimentary, like the 15 images you get from EOSDA LandViewer that you can only download a very low resolution thumbnail. Did you find the data helpful?
Its frankly hilarious they think they can seriously put the words "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" on their homepage.
If money were being charged for it, some might call it "false advertising".
It looks to me more like a VERY limited subset of images from the satellite constellation in question.
Either that, or the constellation in question is minuscule.
I’m all for stomping out bait and switch, but "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" does not imply that you will get all the imagery they have. Same as if i describe a liquid as “water from the Atlantic” it need not be a particularly impressive amount of water.
> Either way, something doesn't add up.
They are in the business of selling a particular type of data. They are not incentivised to give away their product for free. What you see here is the “first hit is free” kind of sample.
According to the people I know from this company, the original use case was tracking the ice cover of the Northern seas, for both marine applications and climate research (the company is Finnish).
I work at Umbra, another SAR company. Even though ICEYE is flying roughly 10 times more satellites on orbit than we are, we have released over 10x more open data (pacing toward over 100x this year at the rate we're both going).
I don't know why Umbra releases so much more open data than ICEYE. But if I had to guess:
1. Umbra is committed to growing the adoption of SAR and supporting research to make it more useful, and ICEYE is not. We think of our open data as a resource for the broader research community; ICEYE views it as an advertisement.
2. We have nothing to hide, and they do. The more data ICEYE releases, the more obvious it becomes how many of their satellites are not actually working (still flying, though!) as well as making it easy to compare apples-to-apples performance with their competition (something they dutifully avoid when possible).
3. Their satellites do not capture much imagery, relatively. While the gap is not 10x per satellite, it's large. When a single high-demand region takes all of your duty cycle to collect, you don't have discretionary capacity left to capture for your open data initiative.
Overall, I'd give them a C or C+ up from a failing grade. Progress.
No.
Its frankly hilarious they think they can seriously put the words "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" on their homepage.
If money were being charged for it, some might call it "false advertising".
It looks to me more like a VERY limited subset of images from the satellite constellation in question.
Either that, or the constellation in question is minuscule.
Either way, something doesn't add up.
> Either way, something doesn't add up.
They are in the business of selling a particular type of data. They are not incentivised to give away their product for free. What you see here is the “first hit is free” kind of sample.
According to the people I know from this company, the original use case was tracking the ice cover of the Northern seas, for both marine applications and climate research (the company is Finnish).