Digital Elevation Models

Digital Elevation Models are the 3D data product line of Array Labs, a Silicon Valley company that designs, builds and operates radar satellites. Conventional satellite 3D products need repeated, carefully choreographed passes over the same area, and airborne lidar is costly and slow to schedule. Array's satellites instead fly in formation as a multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) cluster that images a location from several angles at once, producing 3D imagery in a single pass, day or night and through cloud.

The company advertises continuously refreshed, global elevation datasets with up to 10 cm resolution. Its first production cluster of four satellites is specified for spotlight collections as fine as 20 cm, wide-area 1 m mapping and revisits of any location up to twice a week, and is intended to capture a high-resolution elevation model of the entire planet. Stated applications are navigation and localisation for autonomous systems, including in GPS-denied areas; line-of-sight and RF coverage analysis for network planning; and slope, grade and cut/fill volume measurement for infrastructure, industrial sites and construction.

The data is not yet delivered from the production system: two demonstration satellites flew in 2024, and as of mid-2026 Array Labs was preparing to launch its first production cluster. Capacity is sold in advance through multi-year agreements. Maxar Intelligence has contracted dedicated capacity to update its 3D terrain products, and Array reports agreements with customers in mining, infrastructure and embodied AI.