Digital Beam Forming for Ka-band InSAR instruments

Conference: EUSAR 2014 - 10th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
06/03/2014 - 06/05/2014 at Berlin, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2014

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Ludwig, Michael (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands)
Germani, Chiara; Venturini, Roberto (Thales Alenia Space Italia, Italy)
Schaefer, Christoph (Astrium GmbH, Germany)
Lopez Dekker, Francisco (DLR, Germany)

Abstract:
Ka-Band interferometry offers new opportunities in Earth observation for science and civil security applications due to the unique characteristics of this higher frequency band. Several Ka-Band satellite missions and instruments are currently under development. The first Ka-band instrument, Altika Altimeter [1], is in orbit and has shown remarkable performance confirming the feasibility to use this frequency for EO application despite higher atmospheric losses. However for Ka-band interferometric SAR operating from a single platform the link budget is critical and requires signal recovery techniques. Scan-on-receive combined with digital beam forming overcomes these restrictions and offers additional features leading to high performance systems. This paper discusses possibilities to apply digital beam forming techniques to Ka-band instruments enhancing the performance.