Joint PAZ & TanDEM-X Mission Interferometric Experiments: Interoperability and Products

This article analyzes the potential synergies between the two German satellites of the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X (TSX/TDX) mission and the Spanish PAZ satellite. Since both platforms are almost identical and they were launched in the same orbital plane, comparable images of the same area under the same geometry may be regularly acquired by both systems. This allows the simultaneous exploitation of both missions for building larger time series and improving the revisit time of 11 days for each mission up to 4 or 7 days while combining both. The geometric accuracy and the interferometric performance when combining both sensors are investigated, considering different acquisition parameters and land cover types. For this article several images are acquired over German and Spanish calibration test sites. The results obtained when combining acquisitions from satellites of the TSX/TDX and PAZ missions show no loss of performance with respect to image pairs of the same satellite, indicating that both missions might be exploited synergistically in order to improve current monitoring applications or maybe to allow newer application with tighter requirements in terms of revisit time or temporal coverage. In order to explore all these possibilities, a call for scientific proposals will be jointly opened by the coordinators of the scientific activities of both missions in order to explore the simultaneous exploitation of TSX/TDX and PAZ data.