Experimental verification of COSMO-SkyMed SAR capabilities

COSMO-SkyMed is the Italian Remote Sensing programme which foresees the utilization of a constellation of four SAR Satellites in Low Earth Orbit, dedicated to the management, control and exploitation of Earth resources for civil and defence applications. The Program is completely funded by the Italian Government, mainly through the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR) and the Ministry of Defence (I-AD). Thales Alenia Space Italia is responsible for the design, development and verification of the complete constellation. Satellites will take SAR images of the Earth in the X-band for a variety of government, commercial and scientific users, providing data with unprecedented quality in terms of numbers of images, resolution and accuracy. Following the canonical space qualification and acceptance processes Customers and Thales Alenia Space Italia decided to pursue an end-to-end experimental verification of the SAR instrument in order to provide evidence of its capabilities. With respect to the classical approach for the on-ground verification of space-borne SAR which is done through the verification by parts and the final analytical compilation, it was decided to set-up an Outdoor Verification Test able to exploit all radar functionalities and performance in an integrated approach i.e. radar electronics, antenna and calibrated targets all together. In this paper they are described the test-set-up and the results of the experimental verification campaign made through the qualification hardware of the SAR.