Design overview and flight test results of the miniaturised SAR sensor MISAR

Airborne ground ohservation tasks Like environmental monitoring, border patrol or reconnaissance and surveillance missions are increasingly performed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Today, Mini-UAVs (MUAVs) have reached a high degree of maturity and are deployed and used on a regular basis for a wide variety of missions. However, so far these platforms bad tbe major drawback that due to their limited payload weight capability, they could carry only electrooptical sensor packages. Therefore, MUAV missions presupposed good weather conditions which is not acceptable in securityrelated applications. To overcome this restriction, the highly miniaturised SAR sensor MISAR wus designed especially for these small platforms, taking into account the typical MUAV payload restrictions, flight characteristics and mission profiles. Tbis paper describes the design considerations, the implementation and the flight test results of the MISAR sensor system.