Feasibility study of PRISM-2 onboard ALOS-3 - Simulated image generation

The special and temporal analysis is a primitive approach in the remote sensing field. The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS, nicknamed `Daichi´) has been operated very well from 2006 to 2011, and mainly observed global land region with fine resolutions by three sensors i.e. an L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar called PALSAR and two optical instruments called PRISM and AVNIR-2. They have been captured actual Earth´s surface in to this era. As the ALOS follow-on mission, ALOS-2 is succeeded to the Radar mission of ALOS and carried on the state-of-the-art L-band SAR called PALSAR-2, and will be launched in JFY2013. On another front, the ALOS follow-on optical mission has not been approved by the government. This study describes to generate the simulated images and their evaluations for the next land observation satellite. In JAXA, the optical imager that has capabilities of a finer resolution, wide observation swath width, and stereo function are expected as the PRISM follow-on instrument tentatively called PRISM-2. To identify hardware specifications of PRISM-2 as well as utilization capability of acquired data, simulated images were generated with various parameters using the airborne line scanner, and the image quality, interpretation capacity, and the height estimation accuracy by stereo pair images were evaluated.