Concept Development for Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar
electrical and electronics
Concept Development for Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (GSC-TOPS-323)
Advanced spaceborne radar system for the measurement of terrestrial biomass and ecosystem structure
Overview
Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can globally monitor dynamic processes on the Earths Surface. The last SAR to be developed and deployed by NASA was in the year 2000. This systems high costs inhibited development of new and improved designs. NASA has developed a new, state of the art, SAR system that is capable of providing capabilities beyond established systems and at a fraction of the cost.
The Technology
The current innovation utilizes heritage flight proven L-band Digital Beamforming Synthetic Aperture Radar (DBSAR) in conjunction with a new P-Band Digital beamforming Polarimetric and Interferometric EcoSAR (ESTO IIP) architecture. The system employs digital beamforming (DBF) and reconfigurable hardware to provide advanced radar capabilities not possible with conventional radar instruments. The SAR is operated without the use of a slewing antenna allowing the single radar system to provide polarimetric imaging, interferometry, and altimetry or scatterometry data types. The SAR is also capable of Sweep-SAR, simultaneous SAR/GNSS-R , and simultaneous active/passive techniques.
This system has an increased coverage area and can rapidly image large areas of the surface using the simultaneous left/right imaging. The resulting images maintain their full resolution and allows for faster full coverage mapping
Benefits
- Rapidly image large areas of the surface
- Single radar system can provide different data types
- Multiple synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging techniques
Applications
- Remote Sensing
- Environmental Modeling
