Contributions and Plans of Canadian RADARSAT-1 Mission
- Paper number
IAC-07-B1.1.07
- Author
Mr. Surendra Parashar, Canadian Space Agency, Canada
- Year
2007
- Abstract
Launched in 1995 for a nominal 5 year mission, RADARSAT 1, Canada's first Earth Observation (EO) satellite is now in its 12th year of operations and it continues to perform nominally in extended mission. During this time RADARSAT 1 has supplied C-band, HH polarization, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations to a global user community with notable operational responsiveness and reliability and it has met and exceeded mission requirements. The RADARSAT 1 system continues to offer to users multi-mode (resolution and swath, selectable to suite a particular application) SAR images with global observation capability due to sun-synchronous polar orbit and on-board tape recorder. This supply of SAR imagery to users is provided through an end-to-end RADARSAT 1 system that is geographically and organizationally distributed. The high level of system performance is due to a cohesive team working together through operational policies, procedures and interfaces and undertaking such functions as satellite control and engineering, mission planning, order and data handling, data reception, processing and archiving, image quality control, marketing, sales and data distribution, and mission management. In this paper we review mission performance and accomplishments to-date and summarize the future plans and the status of RADARSAT 1. These include the rapid tasking of the satellite and subsequent data processing and delivery to meet client needs world-wide, provision of a large volume of SAR data daily to Canadian Ice Services in less than 90 minutes after acquisition for operational ice surveillance in the Arctic and the Great Lakes, provision of large volume of data to US NASA/NOAA to meet government science needs including the first high resolution mapping of Antarctic, support to natural disaster management such as through the International Charter Space and Major Disasters, provision of operational interferometric data acquisition, and systematic acquisition of strategic data under the background mission. The future mission of RADARSAT 1 is subject to review and redefinition given that RADARSAT 2, the follow-on mission with an augmented performance and capability such as finer resolution and quad polarization modes, is to be launched this year. The current plans are to continue operations of RADARSAT 1 in parallel for sometime so as to benefit from supply of C-band SAR data from the two satellites.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-07-B1.1.07.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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