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SAR imagery does not have amazing spatial resolution, but is often good enough to do things like identify shipping. Water is a uniquely flat surface, so metal objects floating on water give a good return against a low background signal*. Some computationally demanding image processing later, and you can pick out ship locations. I've got a vague idea that it could be interesting to find ships in the territorial waters of North Korea, correlate against AIS tracks, and try to find some sanction-busting shipping running dark without AIS.

*This makes me wonder: the USSR really struggled with power requirements for the radar on its RORSAT ocean-monitoring satellites, to the point that it ended up having to power them using the only nuclear reactors to be launched into space. Why is SAR so much more efficient?

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