SAR-2000

Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar - 2000 (X-band)

Satellites

COSMO-SkyMed 1 to 4

Status

Operational – Utilised in the period 2007 to ~ 2016

Mission

High-resolution all-weather multi-purpose imager for ocean, land and ice

Instrument type

X-band SAR, frequency ~ 9.5 GHz, multi-polarisation and variable swath/resolution

Scanning technique

Side-looking, possible both to left- and right- end, (alternatively) 20-50° off-nadir, swath 30 to 200 km, depending on operation mode – See table

Coverage/cycle

Global coverage in 2 weeks for the ‘huge swath’ mode (if used 50 % of the time); in longer periods for other operation modes, up to 3 months. The constellation of four COSMO-SkyMed enables to address any selected target every 12 hours, for emergencies

Resolution

1 to 100 m, depending on operation mode – See table

Resources

Mass: … kg - Power: … W - Data rate: … Mbps

Operation mode

Resolution

Swath

Polarisation

Spotlight

1 m

frames of size 10 x 10 km2

HH or VV or HV or VH

Stripmap

3-15 m

40 km

HH or VV or HV or VH

ScanSAR wide swath

30 m

100 km

HH or VV or HV or VH

ScanSAR huge swath

100 m

200 km

HH or VV or HV or VH

Stripmap ping-pong

15 m

30 km

HH/HV + VV/VH