Synthetic Aperture Radar for Small Satellite

Abstract

Small satellites are growing because they have shorter development cycles, lower cost, new technologies, and more frequent access to space. Sensors for Small satellites come with trade-offs to allow them fit within the mass, size, power and weight constraints imposed by the platform, these trade-offs between sensor system parameters can affect the mission requirements. Considering traditional SAR mission, each frequency band has different capability of penetration and special image characteristics, so the final SAR application will determine the appropriate bands needed. Small satellites come with constraints on the SAR sensor, so an analysis of SAR sensor system parameters (antenna length, antenna width and average transmitted power) at L, C and X band given a determined performance parameters is presented to analyze the effect of these frequency change on the system parameters and to determine the frequency band that is more suitable to fit within the small satellite SAR sensors constraints.