Surveying and monitoring of cultural heritage: The role of COSMO-sky med mission

Early applications of SAR in archaeology date back to the 1980s and, although being mainly demonstrative experimentations, they enabled numerous important discoveries. With the development of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in terms of multi-band, multi-polarization and high-resolution data, space radar remote sensing for archaeology has become a potential field for research. Although the archaeological detection capability of this technology has so far not been fully assessed, the advent of Very High Resolution (VHR) space borne SAR sensors, such as Italian COSMO-Sky Med, offered advanced mapping capability at high resolution for archaeology investigations. This paper aims to give an overview of the contribution provided by the COSMO-Sky Med mission in the framework of specific projects in which SAR X-band data have been exploited for the monitoring and the management of cultural and archeological heritage, showing some obtained results.