ALOS PALSAR: A Pathfinder Mission for Global-scale Monitoring of the Environment

The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) is Japan’s new generation Earth Observation satellite, launched in January 2006 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). ALOS carries two optical instruments (PRISM and AVNIR-2) and, to maintain Japan’s commitment to spaceborne L-band SAR, the Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR). Successor to the SAR onboard the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (1992-1998), the PALSAR instrument provides enhanced sensor characteristics, including full polarimetry, variable off-nadir viewing and ScanSAR operations, as well as significantly improved radiometric and geometric performance. At least as important as the technical improvements however, and the reason PALSAR here is referred to as a pathfinder mission for global environmental monitoring, is the systematic data acquisition strategy which has been implemented for ALOS. With a priority second only to emergency observations, the PALSAR observation strategy has been designed to provide consistent, wall-to-wall observations at fine resolution of all land areas on the Earth on a repetitive basis, in a manner which has earlier been conceived only for coarse and medium resolution instruments.

ROSENQVIST Ake; 

2008-05-15

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

JRC37048

0196-2892,