Development of the NASDA Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (NASAR-1)

NASDA has been developing a full polarimetric L-band airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (NASDA Airborne SAR-1: NASAR-1) since the beginning of 1995, in order to establish the complementary system to calibrate the spaceborne SAR and to understand the backscattering characteristics of the targets in this frequency. NASAR-1 onboard Gulfstream II provides the high resolution images of 3 m/spl times/3 m for 20 km of imaging swath. NASAR-1 will be completed by the end of August 1996, and the various experiments will be conducted for CAL/VAL and science purposes. This paper describes the performance and the development status of the NASAR-1.