Satellite Crater Analysis to Estimate Yield and CEP

There have been, as of this writing, two missile attacks on Erbil region targets reported to have been carried out with Fateh-family missiles. While there is yet to be clear public-domain imagery of the most recent attack made available, there is clear data of the 2022-03-13 attack.

An analysis of those images adds some useful real-world data to understanding key parameters of these rapidly proliferating devices.

This analysis is relevant to the 2024-01-15 attack on a building reported as the residence of Peshraw Dizayee, which has been reported as carried out with the same family of missiles. While we are unable to add much insight to that latest attack pending the publication of high resolution satellite images, we were able to derive some estimated performance parameters of the devices used in the earlier strike on a target reported as the residence of Sheikh Baz.

We introduce a modified version of the standard equation for predicting apparent crater radius based on explosive parameters to solve for specific explosive mass from measured apparent crater radius.

KMZ file is available here.

Spreadsheet implementation of calculations is available here.

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