[By columnist Liumidian of Observer's Network]
June 13, 2025, Israel launched Operation "Mighty Lion" against Iran. Israeli Air Force fighters launched JDAM-ER and SDB munitions to strike important targets in Iran, including command posts, long-range radars, air defense positions, ground equipment at Natanz nuclear facility, entrances to underground bunkers, ballistic missile launchers, and air bases. The Israelis even concentrated their strikes on the residences of several senior figures in Tehran, claiming that several key targets, including the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had been killed in this airstrike.
In addition, Israeli agents used a covert method similar to Ukraine's "Spider Web Operation" two weeks ago, launching FPV drones modified from civilian vehicles and Spike missiles from within Iran to attack some ground vehicle equipment. As of the completion of this article, this operation has destroyed or suppressed most of Iran's military assets in the west, possibly destroying several F-14As (13.0).
Of course, there have been many articles discussing this topic, so we will not go into detail here. This article will return to the author's main field of expertise to see what help Israel's reconnaissance satellite system provided for this operation?
Israel's interest in space reconnaissance originated from the fourth and fifth Middle East Wars in 1973 and 1982. In these two wars, the United States provided KH-9 Hexagon and KH-11 Kennen satellite imagery intelligence to Israel, but Israel found that the U.S. provided space intelligence was not useful and not fast enough. At the same time, after Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s, Israel no longer conducted overflight reconnaissance of Egypt, which provided a hard demand for the development of Israel's space reconnaissance capabilities.
After the fifth Middle East War, Israel began to formally seek to build its own space reconnaissance capability. Based on previous investments in aviation and missile projects and preliminary research on space subsystems, IAI, then known as Israel Aircraft Industries, increased investment in its industrial division and established a Space Technology Department. By 1983, the Israeli government officially established the Israel Space Agency under the Ministry of Science and Research, launching the country's space industry.
Earlier, in 1973, Israel believed that the range of the "Jericho-1" missile was insufficient and hoped to purchase the "Pershing-II" ballistic missile from the United States, but the United States refused this request citing reasons such as affecting regional balance. Therefore, Israel decided to develop intermediate-range ballistic missiles independently and launched the "Jericho-2" intermediate-range ballistic missile project in 1977. The "Jericho-2" project had technical exchanges with South Africa and also had certain technical exchanges with the Shah's Iran, but cooperation was terminated after 1979. Although there is currently no accurate information about the performance of the "Jericho-2" missile, some U.S. studies believe that this missile may be capable of striking targets up to 5,300 kilometers away.
Israel's current carrier rocket "Shavit" series is based on improvements to the "Jericho-2" missile and adds an AUS-51 three-stage solid rocket, including its basic model "Shavit", the enhanced first stage "Shavit-1", and the further enhanced second stage "Shavit-2".
The basic model "Shavit" carrier rocket uses ATSM-9 solid rocket engines for both stages, which are gradually replaced by larger ATSM-13 to improve carrying capacity. Israel once planned to purchase Castor-120 solid rocket engines from the American company Thiokol to replace the ATSM-13 of the first stage and add a four-stage using monopropellant hydrazine to form the "Shavit-3" carrier rocket, but it ultimately failed to materialize.
Shavit-2 carrier rocket
However, "Shavit-2" is not perfect. Even after improvement, "Shavit-2" is still a small carrier rocket with only 1.35 meters diameter, a takeoff weight of less than 30 tons, and an even smaller fairing diameter of only 1.25 meters, using an integral shroud design, resulting in very limited payload space. It can only send 500 kilograms of payload into an elliptical orbit with a farthest point of 600 kilometers, greatly limiting the scale of Israel's space reconnaissance system.
Geopolitical factors have brought new challenges to Israel - the "Shavit" series carrier rockets were developed based on "Jericho-2" missile technology. To avoid leaking technology to surrounding countries through fallen debris, Israel could only choose to launch satellites to the west, causing debris to fall into the Mediterranean Sea. This limits satellites to enter large retrograde orbits with inclinations of 141-143 degrees. Not only did they miss out on the speed boost from Earth's rotation, but they also needed to overcome it. This further reduced the carrying capacity of the "Shavit" series carrier rockets. Even the largest "Shavit-2" carrier rocket can only provide a carrying capacity of 300-400 kilograms.
If it were another country, they might have chosen to develop some small-performance satellites. But Israel has established an advanced imaging system in the shell of a snail, optimizing satellite design within extremely limited mass constraints to enhance satellite performance as much as possible. Although Israel's current reconnaissance satellites are not very large, they still perform excellently. In addition, Israel has established a remarkable space product manufacturing system covering satellite platforms, payloads, propulsion systems, and communication equipment, ensuring that its space surveillance capabilities are not constrained.
Shavit-2 carrier rocket launching Ofeq-13 satellite
Optical-electronic imaging satellite based on OPTSAT-3000 platform
Currently, Israel's most advanced optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites, Ofeq-11 and Ofeq-16 satellites, are the third generation of Israel's optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites. The Ofeq-11 satellite was launched in 2016 and re-entered in 2024. The Ofeq-16 satellite was launched in 2020 and is still in orbit. These two third-generation Israeli optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites use IAI's OPTSAT-3000 agile imaging platform and are equipped with the "Jupiter" camera developed by Elbit Systems, capable of imaging in the visible-near infrared band of 450-900μm.
The "Jupiter" camera has an aperture of 700mm and a focal ratio of 22.3, with a fixed-focal-length coaxial optical system. Its visible light camera uses a 30,000-pixel time delay integration-charge coupled device (TDI-CCD), achieving a resolution of 0.5 meters and a swath width of 15 kilometers at an apogee of 600 kilometers, while the resolution at perigee is 0.27-0.3 meters with a swath width of 8.5 kilometers.
According to an article published in 2012, the new generation of optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites equipped with the "Jupiter" camera (referring to Ofeq-11/16) can photograph dozens of targets during one pass thanks to the agile pointing capability of the OPTSAT-3000 platform. It also has a massive hard drive with a capacity of 0.5 Tb to record targets, and its improved data transmission allows more data to be downloaded during one pass.
According to Elbit Systems, the "Jupiter" camera is a very high resolution (VVHR) imaging camera developed specifically for small spacecraft, with advanced military surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. Its ultra-high resolution at perigee can identify small civilian vehicles, objects, and building structures, and conduct strike effect assessment, providing battlefield situation awareness and attack warning (I&W) for the Israeli Defense Forces. The "Jupiter" camera can be equipped with a multispectral camera sharing the same optical path as the panchromatic camera, with 7.5 million pixels and a resolution of 2 meters, providing panchromatic, multispectral, and super-resolution panchromatic images.
"Jupiter" camera
Ofeq-11 satellite image of the World Heritage site Palmyra
Elbit Company promotional video showing the main mirror of the "Jupiter" camera
Elbit Company "Fire Chariot" hyperspectral camera
Israel obtained relevant materials related to the Onyx "Obsidian" synthetic aperture radar satellite in the early 21st century and subsequently planned to build a satellite named TecSAR, a synthetic aperture radar satellite. The U.S. government also showed interest in this project, once planning to purchase TecSAR as one of the rapid response satellites and giving it the designation "Trinidad". TecSAR also uses the OPTSAT-3000 platform, with its core being the ELM-2070 multi-mode synthetic aperture radar provided by the Israel Ministry of Defense's Research and Development Bureau. IAI/Elta and Northrop Grumman collaborated to build it.
In the cooperation, Israel may have obtained part of the capabilities of the Topaz "Topaz" advanced dual-band synthetic aperture radar satellite (such as MISAR) through some channels. In addition, the development of TecSAR received support from India, and its first satellite TecSAR-1/Ofeq-8 was launched into space by an Indian PSLV rocket in 2008. This is the only Ofeq-series satellite launched using a foreign rocket. Israel shared its technology with India, supporting the development of India's RISAT-2 satellite.
Ofeq-8 uses a lightweight mesh rib antenna with a 3-meter aperture. Its synthetic aperture radar provides four modes: push-scan, stare, electronic scan stitching, and wide-area, with a maximum swath width of 120 kilometers and a highest resolution of 1.8 meters.
In addition, Ofeq-8 satellite also has 256Gb of onboard memory, and its mission control mode allows it to complete the process from receiving an uplink task requirement to downlinking satellite photos within 3 hours, with the ability to downlink more than 3,000 satellite images per month.
TecSAR-1/Ofeq-8 satellite
TecSAR introduction board
IAI/Elta ELM-2070 introduction page featuring Ofeq-13 satellite
Ofeq-10, launched in 2014, is a satellite of the same type as Ofeq-8 but underwent some modifications, including the use of an upgraded ELM-2070 synthetic aperture radar payload with significantly improved performance. It may also be equipped with a 5-meter mesh rib antenna, but the data storage capacity decreases to 240Gb.
Ofeq-13 satellite represents the pinnacle of Israel's synthetic aperture radar satellites. It may continue to use the 5-meter-class antenna of the Ofeq-10 satellite but further improves the ELM-2070 payload. Compared to the previous two satellites, the payload mass of the Ofeq-13 satellite has increased by 50%, and the total satellite mass has increased by 27%, reaching 380 kilograms. The deep-improved ELM-2070 payload can provide a resolution of 0.5 meters in spotlight mode.
Compared to the Ofeq-8 and 10 satellites, the design life of the Ofeq-13 satellite has been extended to 8 years, and it has six imaging modes, including multipolarization SAR and re-focusing imaging capabilities. Its ground image processing unit can track moving targets, measure terrain deformation through InSAR, etc. According to reports, at least one identical satellite is currently under development.
Aside from the Ofeq series of military reconnaissance satellites, Israel also operates the EROS series of satellites through ImageSat International (ISI) company, which is based on the technology of the Ofeq series satellites. Among them, EROS-A and EROS-B are built based on the Ofeq-3 satellite platform technology, while the EROS-C satellite plans to use a "Jupiter" camera. This indicates that there will be some commonalities between the technologies of the EROS satellites and the Ofeq satellites. Israel may try out some new technologies on the EROS satellites. Coincidentally, the specifications of ISI's EROS-C3 satellite indicate a resolution of 0.3 meters and a swath width of 12.5 km at an orbital height of 500 km, higher than the original "Jupiter" camera's resolution of 0.38 meters at 500 km. Does this mean that the next optical reconnaissance satellite will use this improved "Jupiter" camera? We will wait and see.
Israel's EROS-B satellite image of North Korean ballistic missile test traces
The Israel Defense Forces' 9900th Brigade is responsible for operating Israel's reconnaissance satellites. This brigade is responsible for formulating satellite operation strategies and providing geographic intelligence. Due to geopolitical reasons, the large retrograde orbit of the Ofeq satellites provides relatively high revisit frequency, allowing satellites to revisit the Middle East area within a shorter cycle.
The Israel Defense Forces collect strategic intelligence (such as Iran's nuclear facilities) around neighboring countries through Ofeq satellites. With the gradual deployment of new-generation satellites, Ofeq satellites can also provide tactical support, including distinguishing similar-looking objects, identifying specific types of weapons, such as surface-to-surface missiles, rocket launchers, or air defense missile sites. Analysts can identify entrances to underground facilities, doors and windows of small urban buildings, and other openings, or discover individuals from space. These images provide information for Israel's combat operations, including guiding glide bombs to penetrate entrances, etc.
Although limited by the carrier rocket fairing, the size of the Ofeq series satellites is not large, resulting in limited swath width. However, they can photograph dozens of targets during one pass, greatly increasing the efficiency of single-pass reconnaissance. These satellites happen to fly over Iranian territory and then over Israeli ground stations to downlink data, basically enabling updates to intelligence within minutes, determining Iran's ballistic missile launch preparation activities, providing target identification and guidance for subsequent operations, and conducting damage assessment after the Israeli Air Force strikes the targets.
In fact, Israel's collection of aerospace intelligence on key facilities in neighboring countries may be recorded on a decadal basis. The reorganized aerospace intelligence and various human intelligence collections provide highly efficient intelligence support for precise strikes. Israel can use its reconnaissance satellites to photograph the construction process of above-ground facilities without obstruction and record the internal structure of the buildings through images taken during different passes, achieving the capability of "indoor structural mapping." The precision strike on bedrooms using SDB glide bombs on June 13 may have been determined through internal structures obtained from several passes of the Ofeq satellites.
The ground shape surveying capability of the Ofeq-10/13 satellites may support the identification of underground air defense shelters and underground activities. The assassination of Nasrallah may also rely on intelligence from Ofeq satellites to determine the location of underground shelters.
SDB ammunition opening a hole in the wall
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