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This mission was designed to use a single-pass radar interferometer to produce a digital elevation model (DEM) of the Earth's land surface between about 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south latitude.
The field of synthetic aperture radar changed dramatically over the past decade with the operational introduction of advance radar techniques such as polarimetry and interferometry. Radar polarimetry became an operational research tool with the introduction of the NASA/JPL AIRSAR system in the early 1980's, and reached a climax with the two SIR-C/X-SAR flights on board the space shuttle Endeavour in April and October 1994. Radar interferometry received a tremendous boost when the airborne TOPSAR system was introduced in 1991 by NASA/JPL, and further when data from the European Space Agency ERS-1 radar satellite became routinely available in 1991. Several airborne interferometric SAR systems are either currently operational, or are about to be introduced. Radar interferometry is a technique that allows one to map the topography of an area automatically under all weather conditions, day or night. The real power of radar interferometry is that the images and digital elevation models are automatically geometrically resampled, and could be imported into GIS systems directly after suitable reformatting. When combined with polarimetry, a technique that uses polarization diversity to gather more information about the geophysical properties of the terrain, a very rich multi-layer data set is available to the remote sensing scientist. This talk will discuss the principles of radar interferometry and polarimetry with specific application to the automatic categorization of land cover. Examples will include images acquired with the NASA/JPL AIRSAR/TOPSAR system in Australia and elsewhere.
A report discusses Ka-band (35-GHz) radar for mapping the surface topography of glaciers and ice sheets at high spatial resolution and high vertical accuracy, independent of cloud cover, with a swath-width of 70 km. The system is a single- pass, single-platform interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) with an 8-mm wavelength, which minimizes snow penetration while remaining relatively impervious to atmospheric attenuation. As exhibited by the lower frequency SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) AirSAR and GeoSAR systems, an InSAR measures topography using two antennas separated by a baseline in the cross-track direction, to view the same region on the ground. The interferometric combination of data received allows the system to resolve the pathlength difference from the illuminated area to the antennas to a fraction of a wavelength. From the interferometric phase, the height of the target area can be estimated. This means an InSAR system is capable of providing not only the position of each image point in along-track and slant range as with a traditional SAR but also the height of that point through interferometry. Although the evolution of InSAR to a millimeter-wave center frequency maximizes the interferometric accuracy from a given baseline length, the high frequency also creates a fundamental problem of swath coverage versus signal-to-noise ratio. While the length of SAR antennas is typically fixed by mass and stowage or deployment constraints, the width is constrained by the desired illuminated swath width. As the across-track beam width which sets the swath size is proportional to the wavelength, a fixed swath size equates to a smaller antenna as the frequency is increased. This loss of antenna size reduces the two-way antenna gain to the second power, drastically reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the SAR system. This fundamental constraint of high-frequency SAR systems is addressed by applying digital beam-forming (DBF) techniques to synthesize multiple simultaneous receive beams in elevation while maintaining a broad transmit illumination. Through this technique, a high antenna gain on receive is preserved, thereby reducing the required transmit power and thus enabling high-frequency SARs and high-precision InSAR from a single spacecraft.