Potentials and Limitations of Moon-Borne SAR Imaging

Moon exploitation is among the next space mission priorities. Earth observation (EO), which is traditionally implemented on artificial lower Earth orbit satellites, can be, in principle, extended to the platform constituted by the natural Earth satellite. With this regard, we investigate the features related to the EO by a possible Moon-borne synthetic aperture radar system in terms of imaging characteristics and potential applications, as well as of expected limitations.