Alert 5 » Patriot?s C-band PESA radar is showing up on SAR satellite images - Military Aviation News
Patriot’s C-band PESA radar is showing up on SAR satellite images
https://medium.com/@HarelDan/x-marks...t-579cdb1f534b
X Marks The Spot: Identifying MIM-104 Patriot Batteries From Sentinel-1 SAR Multi-temporal Imagery
There are two main types of remote sensing satellites: optical and radar. Each type can be subdivided further into sub-categories based on aperture, orbit, and bands. One of the most used is
ESA’s Copernicus program Sentinel 1 pair of satellites, S1A and S1B, giving a combined average revisit time of 1.5 days in a best case scenario. Such a high-resolution and high revisit time, as well as the open access approach, has made the data these satellites provide essential in many fields of study, from emergency response, marine monitoring, vegetation analysis, wildfire quantification, and urban planning.
The data can be freely downloaded and analysed on many platforms, including
Copernicus Open Data Hub,
Sentinel EO Browser and
Google Earth Engine,........
Two paragraphs ago I mentioned that most of the noise can be removed by some forms of image aggregation, or multi-temporal analysis, where for each image pixel the lowest value is selected. When I attempted such a feat in Google Earth Engine, I accidentally selected the maximum value, and the results were staggering. Displaying a combination of VH and VV polarizations, these lines, the result of overlapping ascending and descending orbit interferences, consistently converge. What is it?
Long story short, some of these are AN/MPQ-53/65 phased array radars that form a
Patriot missile battery C². Looking at official documentation, the
military G-band is the civilian C-band. Sentinel-1 central frequency is 5.405 Ghz, well within this range, hence my working hypothesis is that there is some sort of ground based interference with the Sentinel-1 signal.
So anywhere in the world these artifacts appear, they may point to a location of a patriot battery, or other early warning system, as I shall show........
