A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF A NEW X-BAND SAR SATELLITE MISSION FOR TAIWAN

摘要

Taiwan often suffers significant disasters (i.e., mud/land slide, flooding, etc.) from monsoons and typhoons which bring along heavy precipitation in addition to the earthquake disasters. In spite of daily revisit of Formosat-2, its data acquisition operation in Taiwan cannot obtain the needed imagery data during the monsoons and typhoons, unfortunately. A small satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission was defined in 2009 and it has been analyzed for a few years for seeking a payload development solution. A C-band SAR satellite payload for disasters management was successfully defined in 2013 by flying the satellite in a mission architecture familiar to the satellites operators of NSPO. At the same time, the X-band SAR satellite mission was also studied. The mission objectives have been scoped in two main categories and these objectives are to provide 1) Disasters Management (DM) operations support in Taiwan, and 2) Earth Observations (EO) by providing routine land and near sea surface targets assessment with imaging swaths of about 8, 20 and 75 km at the 1-m resolution for SpotLight mode, 3-m resolution for StripMap mode and 12-m resolution for ScanSAR mode, respectively. To reduce development risk, aerial validation of some key parameters has been planned for the mission.