[HN Gopher] Iceye Open Data
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       Iceye Open Data
        
       Author : marklit
       Score  : 97 points
       Date   : 2026-04-17 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.iceye.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.iceye.com)
        
       | kiproping wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | traceroute66 wrote:
         | > Did you find the data helpful?
         | 
         | No.
         | 
         | Its frankly hilarious they think they can seriously put the
         | words _" SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite
         | constellation"_ on their homepage.
         | 
         | If money were being charged for it, some might call it "false
         | advertising".
         | 
         | It looks to me more like a _VERY_ limited subset of images from
         | the satellite constellation in question.
         | 
         | Either that, or the constellation in question is minuscule.
         | 
         | Either way, something doesn't add up.
        
           | krisoft wrote:
           | I'm all for stomping out bait and switch, but "SAR imagery
           | from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" does
           | not imply that you will get all the imagery they have. Same
           | as if i describe a liquid as "water from the Atlantic" it
           | need not be a particularly impressive amount of water.
           | 
           | > Either way, something doesn't add up.
           | 
           | They are in the business of selling a particular type of
           | data. They are not incentivised to give away their product
           | for free. What you see here is the "first hit is free" kind
           | of sample.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | "Iceye" is a homophone nightmare. Ice? Icey? I? Eye? See? C? Sea?
        
         | _doctor_love wrote:
         | You forgot "Ice Ye" - the latest unexpected twist in the saga
         | of Kanye!
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | Does that mean he became an agent on the streets? So if we
           | unmask all of the ICE agents it might be like the finale of
           | the Masked Singer?
        
             | yowlingcat wrote:
             | I was thinking more of a Breaking Bad arc. Pulling off a
             | decent Heisenberg would be a lot easier than some of the
             | other stuff he's done..
        
         | freetonik wrote:
         | It's pronounced "Ice eye".
         | 
         | According to the people I know from this company, the original
         | use case was tracking the ice cover of the Northern seas, for
         | both marine applications and climate research (the company is
         | Finnish).
        
         | skeeter2020 wrote:
         | don't know the answer, but "Icy Eye" is the best
        
         | stronglikedan wrote:
         | I thought it was going to be an ICE tracker from the name
         | alone.
        
       | malux85 wrote:
       | Seeing the glacier move like that is beautiful
        
         | marklit wrote:
         | 141 scenes in this dataset have MP4 counterparts.
        
       | campchase wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | thinkingQueen wrote:
         | That is a very sour take on Iceye. Based on what I've read
         | Iceye is doing better business than Umbra. They can't be that
         | bad. Also, Iceye has demonstrated very good military
         | performance in helping Ukraine.
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-17 23:01 UTC)