The last frontier

Abstract

Satellite technology integrated with advanced data storage and supercomputing systems offers the scientific community perhaps the best opportunity yet to understand once-uncharted territories. In early November 1995, the United States and Canada jointly launched RADARSAT, the newest Earth observation satellite equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The RADARSAT project was originally conceived by Canadian industry in cooperation with federal and provincial governments to study Canada's high-latitude regions, ie, areas bordering the polar icecaps. RADARSAT has a polar orbit of 98.6 degrees, which means that the data it gathers will be of interest to scientists and researchers from around the world interested in the polar regions. The SAR capabilities of the satellite will allow acquisision of accurate images, day or night, through clouds, rain and snow, crucial when documenting changes in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The five year mission of the Canadian-owned satellite is to acquire and downlink geophysical data from the Earth's surface, with emphasis on the polar regions.