"COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione" - civilian product specifications

“COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione†(CSG) programme has been taking place since 2010. It has been funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian ministry of defence. CSG system is the follow-on mission of the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) mission, currently operating with four Earth Observation SAR satellites. The two CSG follow-on satellites aim at providing operational continuity to CSK with increased performance, flexibility and ability to respond to updated civilian and defence user needs. The CSG programme has closed the Mission Critical Design Review, and it is foreseen that CSG PFM & CSG FM2 will be launched in mid 2019 and mid 2020 respectively. An overview of CSG products characteristics has been reported in this paper. More products with higher resolution will be made available thanks to three spotlight acquisition modes: spotlight 2a, spotlight 2b, spotlight 2c, all modes operating in single or dual polarization. A very original novelty will be the possibility to perform all the spotlight Non-standard operational acquisitions with the satellite in a “squinted†(we mean “pitched†) attitude, and the new Non-Standard operational DI2S spotlight 2 multi-swath mode, based on both SAR and platform agility. The CSK Scansar modes will be significantly improved with CSG Scansar -1 and -2 modes, having the same swaths but enhanced geometric and radiometric quality and dual polarization. The basic Stripmap product is available in single or dual polarisation featuring the same CSK resolution and swath size. Furthermore, CSG have a full Stripmap quad-polarisation mode, able to estimate the full polarimetric characteristics of a target area. In continuity with CSK, a multi-polarisation Stripmap image can also be acquired using the Ping-Pong mode, which is a “burst polarimetric†mode. SAR standard products are generated starting from input data acquired by the above mentioned instrument modes. They are classified in five processing levels (from 0 up to 1d level),. The paper highlights the basic features of each standard CSG product, concerning with sample information, projections, basic and special processing step performed to generate them, the expected image quality specifications. Also, an overview of CSG Non-Standard products (quick-look, speckle filtered, co-registered, interferometric, coherence, DEM, mosaicked, cropped products) has been provided. Copyright © 2018 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). All rights reserved.