The acquisition modes of COSMO-Skymed di Seconda Generazione: A new combined approach based on SAR and platform agility

COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione is the second generation of the Italian infrastructure for satellite Earth Observation based on Synthetic Aperture Radars. Among the several improvements with respect to the first generation, CSG will feature a set of acquisition modes providing significant enhancements: (1) increased versatility in terms of different combinations of resolution and swath width; (2) improved resolution in narrow-field as well as wide-field acquisition modes; (3) enhanced polarisation characteristics: most of acquisition modes will be able to provide dual-polarisation products (HH-HV or VV-VH) and a quad-polarisation, interleaved Stripmap mode will be featured as well; (4) better geolocation performances; (5) capability of increasing the number of acquisition over small regions by means of SAR agility or platform agility, thus reducing the conflicts among user requests which would have been overlapped in azimuth in case of standard, zero-doppler acquisitions; (6) potentiality to further extend the acquisition modes portfolio exploiting the SAR agility.