Impacts of Radar Echoes on Internal Calibration Signals in the TerraSAR-X Instrument

Abstract

For calibrating and monitoring the required radiometric stability, the radar instrument of TerraSAR-X features an internal calibration facility coupling into an additional port of the TRMs. Calibration pulses are routed through the front-end to characterise critical elements and parameters of the transmit (TX) and receive (RX) path. Changes in the signal path appear due to thermal effects, degradation, or extreme conditions in space. Especially the front-end TRMs controlling the phased array antenna are of crucial significance for the instrument reliability. There are many indications that the interference of the RX-Calibration signals is caused by an echo from a transmitted TerraSAR-X chirp pulse of the same data take. As consequently implemented in the TerraSAR-X system, different approaches solve these effects of signal interference. In orbit, the commanding sequence can be optimised for avoiding interference. At processing level, averaging techniques minimise the noise effects inside the calibration signals. This paper presents the effects of the radar echoes on the whole internal calibration process and how they can be detected and minimised.