A Spaceborne Ka-Band SAR Interferometer Concept based on Scan-on-Receive Techniques

Abstract:
In the recent years, various spaceborne Ka-band concepts have been proposed, especially for conventional and wide swath interferometric altimetry. However, Ka-band would be attractive for across track SAR inter-ferometry as well, for applications in DEM generation or products requiring ground height information. Due to its short wavelength Ka-band could allow reasonable baselines lengths for interferometry from a single platform. For this mission scenario the paper presents in a first approach a possible mechanical and electrical configura-tion and the associated performance of a Ka-band high resolution single-pass InSAR instrument. The paper shows that the proposed configuration achieves similar performance of state-of-the-art multi satellites interfer-ometric SAR missions operating at lower frequency bands (i.e. TanDEM-X). In addition, the paper analyzes the impact of precipitation on the DEM height accuracy.