Wide Swath SAR Instrument for Global Monitoring based on Digital Beam Forming

Abstract

The European Space Agency undertakes the development of the European Radar Observatory Sentinel-1 as part of the ‘Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)’ program in a joint initiative together with the European Commission (EC) to support Europe’s goals regarding sustainable development and global governance of the environment by providing timely and quality data, information, services and knowledge. The focus of the multi satellite constellation Sentinel-1 is to provide a continuation of SAR image data in C-band for user services which have developed from ESA’s ERS and ENVISAT missions. The crucial requirements for operational sustainable services are continuity of data supply, frequent revisit, geographical coverage and timeliness which translates into a high operation duty cycle of 25% per orbit and a wide imaged swath of 250 km in the nominal operational imaging mode. Based on the imaging requirements for the Sentinel-1 constellation a study was performed to investigate what improvements could be achieved through new instrument concepts based on digital beam forming and to identify the technologies that have to be developed to be able to realize such an instrument in the following generation of Sentinel-1 satellites.