Emirates takes a technological leap forward and gets its first radar satellite
The Union of Arab Emirates has just launched the inaugural link of its future radar satellite constellation into orbit, making it the first country in the Gulf region to have the space technology to observe day, night and even in cloudy weather over any area of the world.
The unnamed device is owned by Bayanat, an Emirati state-owned company that provides geospatial information services to the UAE Armed Forces and the government of President Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, as well as to customers in third countries.
The new platform in space belongs to the third generation of radar satellites designed and manufactured by Iceye, a Finnish company that in just over five years of activity has positioned itself as the world's largest manufacturer and leading commercial operator of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, with some thirty platforms in space.
The Iceye spacecraft acquired by Bayanat was placed at an altitude of between 560 and 580 kilometres by a Falcon 9 launcher from Elon Musk's SpaceX company, launched on 16 August from the US Space Force's Vandenberg base in California, along with 115 other small spacecraft from different countries.
To make the leap to radar technology, the green light from the President of the United Arab Emirates was required. It has materialised through a partnership between Bayanat and Yahsat, the country's leading state-owned satellite communications operator. Both companies belong to the group of companies owned by the sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, whose raison d'être is to invest in domestic and foreign companies of strategic interest to the Emirati government.
Merger of Yahsat and Bayanat in the near future
The close cooperation between Yahsat and Bayanat is for strategic reasons and is ‘the step prior to the merger of the two companies to form the new Space42 company’, stresses Yahsat Group CEO Ali Al Hashemi, for whom ‘our first radar satellite is an example of the path we are following to form the new company’.
A merger approved by the two companies on 25 April, the new Space42 entity has its raison d'être in the complementarity and synergies between Bayanat, which works on geospatial data analysis in the field of artificial intelligence, and the operator Yahsat, which also provides secure transmissions to the UAE Ministry of Defence.
Its five satellites in service reach 150 nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania and provide internet services in some 30 countries. According to Bayanat CEO Hasan Al Hosani, the first radar satellite will provide ‘more comprehensive and higher quality’ services to customers of both companies, ‘both locally and internationally’.
The result will be a ‘commercial multi-orbit satellite operator, with platforms positioned in geostationary orbit at an altitude of 35,786 kilometres and in low earth orbit, at less than 600 kilometres,’ Ali Al Hashemi said. The aim of the integration is to ‘cover the entire value chain and provide timely, accurate and high-value geospatial information’ for both the oil industry and the rest of the country's strategic enterprises and armed forces.
Space42 also aims to be the ‘Emirates’ response to the rapid evolution of space technology and its new business models’, says its director, Karim Michel Sabbagh, former CEO between 2014 and 2018 of Luxembourg-based commercial satellite communications operator SES, to whom the Emirati authorities have entrusted the management of the new corporation from December 2023.
The choice: Finland's small radar satellites
Sabbagh stresses that the combination of the two companies is a bid to establish ‘a national space technology champion and support the diversification of the country's economy’. President Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan's government wants ‘sovereign radar data’ to enhance the UAE's defence, security and privacy capabilities in all strategic areas in which the Gulf nation is engaged.
The creation of the SAR radar satellite constellation was announced by the UAE government in mid-July 2022 as the ‘cornerstone’ of the so-called National Space Fund. The National Space Fund was endowed with $817 million at the same time to create the Sirb (Arabic for ‘flock of birds’) radar constellation, which is part of the UAE Space Agency's Earth Observation Space Programme.
Bayanat and Yahsat reached an agreement in May 2023 with Iceye, which assumes the role of technology partner responsible for realising the Arab world's first radar satellite system. The contract obliges the Finnish company to manufacture a constellation of six satellites and to create some capabilities on Emirati soil linked to the manufacture of satellite components. The UAE is thus continuing its policy of diversifying its investments, especially in critical sources of technology dependence.
Small in size, weighing around 110 kilos at take-off and equipped with 500 Mbits per second ground data download equipment, Iceye's devices are the fruit of the determination of the company's two young founders, Rafał Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila. Their mini-satellites have five solar panels to generate power and a 9.65 GHz X-band active antenna with a surface area of 3.2 x 0.4 metres when deployed.
The advantage of SAR radar technology is that it is based on an active detection system that illuminates the Earth's surface and measures the reflected signal to generate high-resolution images. Unlike observation satellites that provide optical images in the visible and infrared spectrums, radar technology captures images day and night, regardless of weather, atmospheric conditions or the degree of solar illumination. Brazil appreciated these capabilities and its air force purchased two of its in-orbit satellites, which it has renamed Carcará 1 and 2, in 2020.