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.
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xnx
"Iceye" is a homophone nightmare. Ice? Icey? I? Eye? See? C? Sea?
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kiproping
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?
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.
"Iceye" is a homophone nightmare. Ice? Icey? I? Eye? See? C? Sea?
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?
Seeing the glacier move like that is beautiful