JAPANESE EARTH RESOURCES SATELLITE-1 SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR

This paper deals with the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to be launched on the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite-1. The SAR is operated in L-band. The purpose of the mission is mainly dedicated for geological applications. The ground resolution of the processed image is designed as 18 m and the off-nadir angle required to meet geological applications is 35 deg. The key system parameter design and performance are introduced along with the reason of choosing such design parameters. For the hardware currently developed, ground test results are presented. The antenna is a thin-flat-foldable configuration which has a 11.9 m by 2.2 m aperture when extended in orbit. The transmitter, receiver, and signal processor are all solid-state type to achieve high reliability of operation. They transmit an 1100-W peak (minimum) chirp pulse and receive the return echos and process the echo signals into in-phase and quadrature data streams.