Evolution of the RADARSAT Program

The RADARSAT program takes its origin in the seventies when the Canadian Government was seeking a reliable technology to ensure safe navigation through sea ice. At that time there was an expectation that it would be necessary for large tanker to navigate through the Beaufort Sea to transport oil extracted from drilling platforms. During the same period the Canadian Center for Remote Sensing was developing SAR applications using an airborne SAR instrument on a Convair 580. One of these applications of great interest for the Canadian Ice Service was ice discrimination provided by the C-band SAR data to support the development of ice map to guide navigation in winter in the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence Seaway. With the combination of both, interest for oil transportation in the Beaufort Sea and the need for accurate and frequent ice map the business case for RADARSAT- 1 was born. This paper provides an overview on the RADARSAT program since its beginning and is partially based on a presentation delivered in October 2013 at the Canadian Space Agency on the motivation and evolution of the RADARSAT program [1].