Mission design and performance for systematic deformation measurements with a spaceborne SAR system

Tandem-L is an L-band SAR satellite mission currently under study at DLR. It is intended to serve a number of geophysical applications in several domains, like solid Earth, ecosystems and cryosphere. The various applications compete for the system resources and the mission design optimization requires that a performance model is developed for each application in order to allow motivated choices. We describe the adopted approach for deformation measurements, which is based on recent formulations of the Cramer-Rao bound for multi-image SAR interferometry and on the a-posteriori combination of the measurements from different lines of sight. We also discuss the limitations that the use of a reduced set of interferograms would entail.