Capella SAR Data

Capella SAR Data is the radar imagery service of Capella Space, a US company (now part of IonQ) that operates its own constellation of X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. Its radar images the surface day and night, through cloud and smoke.

Customers search Capella's archive or task new collections through the self-serve Capella Console web app or a RESTful API. An automated scheduler re-plans the constellation every 15 to 20 minutes over a rolling seven-day window, with repeat tasking at user-defined cadences. Collection types range from Spotlight Ultra (5 x 5 km scenes, 0.25 m azimuth resolution) to Stripmap and Parallel Stripmap strips up to 100 km long.

Collections are processed automatically into complex (SLC, SICD, CPHD) and detected (GEO, GEC, SIDD) products, Colorized Sub-aperture Images that highlight man-made and moving objects, and optional vessel classification analytics. Data is downloaded via the Console or API, or pushed to a customer AWS S3 bucket. An InSAR Collection Tier delivers repeat-pass SLC data on 3-, 6- or 7-day cycles within a 500 m orbital tube; Capella leaves interferograms and displacement maps to analytics partners.

Capella names the NGA, NRO, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force and Defense Innovation Unit among its customers, with government contracts since 2021; in 2026 the NRO awarded it a Radar Commercial Augmentation contract, and NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program evaluated its data. Tasking runs on AWS GovCloud FedRAMP High, aligned to U.S. NIST 800-171 requirements. It also publishes a free open SAR dataset on AWS under CC BY 4.0.