The development of the ENVISAT-1 Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar

Author

Mancini, P. ; Suchail, J.-L. ; Desnos, Y.-L. ; Torres, R. ; Guijarro, J. ; Graf, G.

Author_Institution

ENVISAT-1 Project, Eur. Space Res. & Technol. Centre, Noordwijk, Netherlands

Volume

2

fYear

1996

fDate

27-31 May 1996

Firstpage

1355

Abstract

The Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) selected for the ENVISAT-1 mission of the European Space Agency, represents a sensor of paramount importance for the remote sensing community due to its enhanced flexibility with respect to the ERS AMI synthetic aperture radar. The unique combination of different spatial resolutions, incidence angles, swath width sizes and polarisation diversity will reflect in an increased number of operational modes tailored for a large set of scientific and operational applications. The use of an active antenna concept for tailoring the transmit and receive elevation beams to different mode geometry, a digital generation waveform technique for obtaining variable time-bandwidth products and a block adaptive quantization compression scheme are among the innovative design features of this radar. In this paper, the status of the ASAR instrument development are described, the accomplished project milestones are highlighted together with preliminary instrument performances

Keywords

geophysical equipment; geophysical techniques; radar antennas; radar equipment; radar polarimetry; remote sensing by radar; satellite antennas; spaceborne radar; synthetic aperture radar; ASAR; Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar; ENVISAT; ENVISAT-1; SAR imaging; active antenna; block adaptive quantization compression; digital generation waveform; geophysical equipment; land surface; measurement technique; polarisation diversity; radar polarimetry; radar remote sensing; satellite instrument; synthetic aperture radar; terrain mapping; variable time-bandwidth; Adaptive arrays; Ambient intelligence; Instruments; Polarization; Radar antennas; Receiving antennas; Remote sensing; Space missions; Spatial resolution; Synthetic aperture radar;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 1996. IGARSS '96. 'Remote Sensing for a Sustainable Future.', International

Conference_Location

Lincoln, NE

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3068-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.1996.516661

Filename

516661