![]() Master’s firm, Umbra, is part of that gold rush. Predictably, startups and defense giants alike are coming to cash in. “It’s almost like having a night-vision flashlight.” “It’s like a whole different way of looking at the Earth,” said Alberto Valverde, of the Analytic Tradecraft Office at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They can see whether a car has driven through snow or left ruts on a muddy road - in the dark, during a storm. They can stare through a hurricane and catch what North Korea is up to at 2 a.m. SAR satellites have helped discover a giant wind turbine farm likely powering Chinese missile silos, mapped flooding after a typhoon, tracked rogue ships and watched wildfire progression. Energy industrialists, climate researchers, farmers and disaster-response firms are all interested in what this spacey radar can do for them. The intelligence community is buying data and analytics from private companies. Once the shrug-shouldered stepchild of the commercial satellite sector, the SAR industry is now having a moment: Both the cost of launch and the price of relevant technology have dropped during the 21st century, as both have become more capable. That’s why, back in March, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation asked SAR companies to send real-time data his way. The result is detailed maps that show the world as it is, and as it’s changing. ![]() They reflect off whatever they hit on the ground and bounce back up to detectors on the satellites. ![]() These microwaves shoot through clouds and don’t know the difference between day and night. Instead of using cameras to detect visible light, they rely on a technology called synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that beams microwaves at Earth. That’s where a newer kind of satellite comes in. Satellites equipped with regular cameras can’t, it turns out, snap shots of most of the planet most of the time: Around 70 percent of the globe is shrouded in clouds, and at any given time about half of the planet also happens to be dark. The reason? “It’s pretty much cloudy every day,” he said. “It’s because those are the only really great ones.” “It’s not because they’re not sharing all of them,” said Master, chief operating officer at a satellite company called Umbra. But the total number of public, high-resolution pictures is low given how long the war has been going on. Satellite images of the Russian invasion revealed the miles-long military convoy near Kyiv, a new base in Crimea, bodies on streets, a bombed-out theater. Those images can reveal details about the ongoing war with Russia that might otherwise be inaccessible to people thousands of miles away. Instead, he wants to know whether satellites might be able to take good pictures of the besieged country that day. He doesn’t need to meteorologically or militarily prepare - he lives safely in Santa Barbara, California. Todd Master has been spending a lot of time lately looking at the weather forecasts in Ukraine.
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