Low-cost realisation of space-borne synthetic aperture radar - MICROSAR (September 2003)

Civilian space-borne remote sensing has been exploited in the areas of meteorology and optical imaging since the early 1970s. Until recently, these satellite systems have generally been commissioned exclusively by government institutions or agencies. There have been only a limited number of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions amongst these civilian remote sensing missions, even though SAR offers another dimension of information and additional capability including all-weather, day-night imaging. Three factors may explain this situation: 1) SAR images are not visible images that humans are used to interpreting and the relationships between the SAR processed data/images to the specific information needs have not been widely understood or robust. 2) There is a chicken and egg paradox, that the demand does not exist as the availability of suitable sources, at the relevant performance and data quality, have been inadequate to provide service assurance that is necessary to sustain commercial businesses. 3) Costs associated with developing a SAR capability including building, launching and operating a space-borne SAR sensor have not been low enough to achieve an acceptable return on investment.