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US and Indian military sources say that, if successful, the twin launch by the same Polaris/TecSat vehicle Sept. 17-20 will add Israel to the few nations with imaging radar reconnaissance satellites able to distinguish camouflaged vehicles from rocky terrain-by night and through foliage.The Israeli military satellite will lift off along with India’s first military recon spacecraft, Cartosat 2A. They will be fired in an approximately 600-km polar orbit atop the same Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from an island in the Bay of Bengal.The data-gathering features of Polaris 1 are especially pertinent for a potential attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.DEBKAfile’s military sources add that the Israeli satellite’s ability to “see through” cloud and foliage and distinguish between camouflaged vehicles and rocks, provide an answer for Iran’s ingenious camouflaging methods employed by Hizballah in the 2006 Lebanese war.The Indian Cartosat 2A spacecraft on the same mission is secret. It carries a powerful panchromatic camera. New Delhi is interested in buying Israel’s imaging radar satellite design for its reconnaissance operations which focus on Pakistan, China and increasingly the US.Polaris 1 is electronically steered, and its synthetic aperture radar has a 1-meter resolution; its differing spot, mosaic and strip modes provide many different radar aspect angles from which to illuminate ground targets, a huge military asset for precise data-gathering on Iran’s military weapons systems and an improvement over the information available to ordinary spy satellites. Polaris radar-imaging intelligence features compare in quality to the U-2’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar 2A sensor, according to Jeff Grant, a Northrop Grumman official.Our military sources report that the new radar satellite continues the spurt in Israeli milsat development and complements the features of another new imaging reconnaissance spacecraft, Ofek-7 which was launched in June and offers an improved, half-meter resolution.Western military sources report that in February and March 2007, Israel carried out at least three more successful satellite launchings but was equally successful in blanketing them with secrecy.As in the days of Noah....
