X Marks The Spot: Identifying MIM-104 Patriot Batteries From Sentinel-1

There are two main types of remote sensing satellites: optical and radar. Each type can be subdivided further into sub-categories based on aperture, orbit, and bands. One of the most used is ESA’s Copernicus program Sentinel 1 pair of satellites, S1A and S1B, giving a combined average revisit time of 1.5 days in a best case scenario. Such a high-resolution and high revisit time, as well as the open access approach, has made the data these satellites provide essential in many fields of study, from emergency response, marine monitoring, vegetation analysis, wildfire quantification, and urban planning. The data can be freely downloaded and analysed on many platforms, including Copernicus Open Data Hub, Sentinel EO Browser and Google Earth Engine,

Whereas optical imagery can have optical interferences like clouds and dust, radar images can for the most part “see” through water vapor and other fine particulate matter. Conversely, radars can be susceptible to interferences from other radiation sources on the ground and in the air transmitting in similar wavelengths. Free roaming with Sentinel-1 data, you encounter many types of interferences, blips, bloops, speckles, and waves, so aggregating several images can create a smoother image, and remove some if not all of the interferences….

What is it? Long story short, some of these are AN/MPQ-53/65 phased array radars that form a Patriot missile battery C². Looking at official documentation, the military G-band is the civilian C-band. Sentinel-1 central frequency is 5.405 Ghz, well within this range, hence my working hypothesis is that there is some sort of ground based interference with the Sentinel-1 signal. So anywhere in the world these artifacts appear, they may point to a location of a patriot battery, or other early warning system, as I shall show. Here are several locations as seen in the GEE results viewer, and a zoom in of the convergence using Google satellite imagery.

This article is from 2018, five years ago. During both Gulf Wars, the US bought up all the commercial satellite imagery that might threaten operations. This is a known problem with know solutions.

Quora: Won't the Patriot missile batteries in Ukraine become easy targets for the Russians?

"Because there's nothing easy about killing a very sophisticated weapon system designed specifically to deal with this exact threat."
"They are designed specifically to shoot down the very types of missiles and aircraft that the Russians would have to use to attack them, and they are very good at it, so the missiles and/or aircraft are unlikely to get through."

Even if Russia knows exactly where they are, they have to attack with weapons the Patriots are designed to shoot down. If Russia engages the Patriot batteries, then Russia is not targeting Ukrainian cities. The Patriots are "bomb magnets" if they can be found, except Russian cruise missile targeting is slower than the Patriots ability to move around. The batteries are further protected by rings of other short range air defenses, AA guns and MANPADS.

For all Russia has thrown at the Patriots, all they did was give one part of one system down time for less than a day. Then Russia claimed to destroy more Patriot systems than Ukraine has.

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