Dedicated calibration concept for interferometric SAR companion missions

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

Marc Rodriguez-Cassola European Space Agency (ESA)
Pau Prats-Iraola European Space Agency (ESA)
Matteo Nannini European Space Agency (ESA)
Paco López-Dekker Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), European Space Agency (ESA)
Alberto Moreira European Space Agency (ESA)
Bernardo Carnicero Dominguez European Space Agency (ESA)
Affiliation
External organisation
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Published Date

2016

Language

English

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Affiliation

External organisation

Abstract

Companion SAR missions offer a cost-effective solution to boost the performance and capabilities of existing SAR missions. With the use of companion satellites, a whole suite of coherent single-pass observations become feasible, allowing for the interferometric and tomographic exploitation of the received data. Interferometric and tomographic measurements are however very sensitive to even the slightest degradations in the phase of the received data, and impose stringent requirements on the calibration concept of the mission. Weakly-synchronised companion SAR missions may have significant residual clock errors, which challenge the attainment of this requirements. We put forward an innovative calibration concept based on autonomous (data-based) calibration at different product levels and present an estimation of the expected performance for ESA's SAOCOM/CS mission.