CONTRIBUTIONS AND PLANS OF CANADIAN RADARSAT 1 MISSION

摘要

Launched in 1995 for a nominal 5 years 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 and a number of direct data reception stations around the world. This supply of SAR imagery to users is provided through an end-to-end RADARSAT 1 system that is geographically and organizationally distributed. In this paper we review mission performance and accomplishments to-date and summarize the future plans and the status of RADARSAT1.