Development of the onboard processor for Pi-SAR2

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been utilized for monitoring natural disaster areas because the SAR observation can be performed irrespective of the daylight and weather conditions. To reduce the time from observation to distributing SAR images to the headquarters for disaster control and disaster area, we have developed an onboard processor which is capable of doing a full-spec processing for the airborne SAR called as the polarimetric and interferometric SAR (Pi-SAR2) since 2009. We demonstrated that the developed onboard processor is effective to reduce the time from observation to distribution and the SAR image can be transferred to the ground within 15 min after observation via the communication satellite called as the engineering test satellite VIII (ETS-VIII) in the experiments on March 2011.