New Concept of Synthetic Aperture Instrument for High Resolution Earth Observation from High Orbits

摘要

High Resolution Earth Observation from high orbits (e.g. Geostationnary) requires the use of large diameter telescopes, unfeasible if considering monolithic concepts. It is necessary, to circumvent this problem, to consider a segmented instrument, turning it into a feasible concept that can be put into orbit. Optical Aperture Synthesis (OAS) can be considered as a solution for HR observation from high orbits. In this paper, we describe a new OAS imaging instrument concept (under study in the Alcatel Space Research Department 1) having variable resolution and field of view by adopting a re- decomposition of the basic Michelson or Fizeau interferometer schemes. In addition to providing variable resolution power and field of view, this instrument concept is particularly robust to sub-systems failure since it shows a natural redundancy of its imaging capabilities.