Verification of Sentinel-1B Internal Calibration - First Results

Konferenz: EUSAR 2016 - 11th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
06.06.2016 - 09.06.2016 in Hamburg, Germany

Tagungsband: EUSAR 2016

Seiten: 4Sprache: EnglischTyp: PDF

Persönliche VDE-Mitglieder erhalten auf diesen Artikel 10% Rabatt

Autoren:
Tous Ramon, Nuria; Schwerdt, Marco; Castellanos Alfonzo, Gabriel; Schmidt, Kersten (Microwave and Radar Institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany)

Inhalt:
Sentinel-1B is the second of a two satellite constellation in the frame of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus program, formerly Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). Together with its predecessor Sentinel-1A, its main objective is to ensure the continuity and improvement of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data acquisitions in C-band for global monitoring applications. Sentinel-1A has been in orbit since April 2014 while Sentinel-1B launch is scheduled for April 2016. The two identical satellites fly within the same orbit with an orbit phasing of 180deg providing a repeat cycle of 6 days. The internal calibration approach is based on the acquisition of different types of calibration signals, such that the radar instrument stability can be guaranteed. Compared to previous SAR instruments, the Sentinel-1 twins do not incorporate a calibration network formed by individual passive components, resulting in more than doubling the number of calibration signal types acquired and therefore increasing the complexity of the internal calibration approach significantly. Furthermore, special RF Characterisation (RFC) data will be acquired in order to monitor and assure the TRM performance. As already done for Sentinel-1A in 2014, an independent SAR system calibration of Sentinel-1B will be performed by DLR parallel to the commissioning phase executed by ESA. Since Sentinel-1B had not been launched at the time of uploading the full paper, first results are obtained from real data acquired on-ground before launch. In-orbit results from commissioning phase will be presented at the conference in June 2016.