Processing, Performance and Preliminary End-to-End Results of the Harmony Mission for Land Applications

Abstract

The Harmony (previously known as STEREOID) mission concept has been selected as candidate mission for ESA's Earth Explorer 10 [1][2]. It consists of two identical small satellites carrying a receive-only radar instrument as main payload flying in a reconfigurable formation with Sentinel-1C or D, which will work as transmitter. The radar measurements are to be enhanced and supported by a medium resolution dual visible and near-infrared (VNIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) payload. The Harmony mission will be organized in several phases, with different formation configurations optimized for the retrieval of deformation fields over land, ice, and oceans, and topography changes over land and ice, respectively. In all mission phases, the Harmony-A and B satellites will be flying at an along-track distance of about 250 km to the transmitter. The following sections analyse on the first hand the technical aspects related to bistatic SAR image formation and InSAR processing under the presence of the large Doppler centroid, which in Harmony occur due to the large along-track baseline. The second part of this contribution presents the first results on the performance for solid Earth applications, namely topography change and 3-D deformation.