NATO STO

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems on space-borne platforms can provide very useful information for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes. Corresponding geoinformation is essential for decision making of military leaders concerning situation assessment in crises, conflicts, peace keeping missions or war. The information collection with space-borne SAR-systems operating at microwave frequencies is independent on day- and night-time, nearly independent on adverse weather conditions. Additionally the use of sensors on satellite platforms is internationally accepted as a nonintrusive method. Since 2007 mainly three space-borne SAR-missions (Radarsat 2, COSMO-SkyMed, TerraSAR-X) are operating very successfully in C- and X-band at spatial resolutions between 1 m and 3 m. All the systems together are capable to acquire about 100.000 images per year. Especially interesting is COSMO-SkyMed which forms with its 4 satellites a constellation and can achieve a corresponding shorter revisit time. The research work carried out in this group is therefore focused on the extraction of geospatial intelligence and show its relevance for NATO operations in the following subjects: generation of digital elevation and surface models, targets detection, recognition, and identification, and detection of changes. NATO doesn’t use the potential the moment available, already existing images of existing commercial SAR missions