The capability this claim enables is all-weather, day-and-night imaging from orbit. US12644981B2, "System, method, and satellites for surveillance imaging and earth observation using synthetic aperture radar imaging" (granted June 2, 2026 to MDA Systems Ltd.), is a SAR claim — and SAR is the part of the earth-observation market that optical imagers physically cannot touch.
The mechanism, stated plainly: synthetic aperture radar moves a radar antenna along the satellite's orbital path and combines the returns gathered over that path as if they came from one enormous antenna. That synthetic aperture is what buys the resolution. Because it is active radar at radio wavelengths, cloud, smoke, and night are not obstacles — the sensor makes its own illumination. The CPC anchors are explicit: G01S 13/9005 (SAR), with G01S 13/9021 and G01S 13/64, the radar-imaging art.
Why this is a system claim, not just a sensor claim, matters. The title says "system, method, and satellites" — MDA is claiming the architecture for doing SAR surveillance across satellites, not merely one radar box. For a constellation, that distinction is the whole game: the competitive edge in radar earth observation is revisit rate and tasking, which are properties of the system, not of any single spacecraft.
Examiner discipline on scope: this covers the specific SAR surveillance/observation configuration the claims describe. SAR itself is decades old; what is granted is MDA's particular system-and-method realization of it. Do not read an old, broad field as newly enclosed — read the claim.
For the landscape, MDA is a notable assignee to see here: a long-standing space-systems builder (the lineage behind RADARSAT and orbital robotics) staking system-level IP in commercial SAR exactly as the radar-imaging market commercializes. When a heritage radar house patents the constellation architecture rather than just a payload, it is signaling where it thinks the durable advantage in earth observation now lives — in the system that tasks and combines many radar satellites, not in any one of them.