The New ONERA Multispectral Airborne SAR System

This paper provides an overview of the new airborne SAR system developed by the French Aerospace Lab ONERA over the last two years. This system, called SETHI, was developed according to the standard FAR25 applied to civil application. The main improvement compared to the previous ONERA airborne radar system RAMSES is that the antennas are located in two pods compatible with small aircrafts like the Falcon 20. This pod-based configuration allows the easy integration of any kind of payloads under the single certification of the pods by authorities. In the first section a quick introduction presents the aircraft configuration (cabin and pods) with an overview of SETHI development. The second section describes the SETHI concept with the installation on board the falcon 20 cabin, the hardware development to control and command all ONERA racks, the pods with their control and command systems. The last section illustrates the validation campaign which took place in September 2007 at Nîmes Garons Airport in France.