A multichannel spaceborne radar for the COSMO-Skymed Satellite Constellation

This work briefly describes a multibeam synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for COSMO-SkyMed of second generation, that can be obtained by limited modifications to the design of the original design (first generation). The new system is characterized by multiple transmitting and receiving channels, to achieve the largest possible baseline. This is required for MTI (moving target indicator) surveillance, sea surface monitoring by along-track interferometry, and moving targets relocation in high resolution SAR images. Moreover, a fully polarimetric SAR is obtained by using an active antenna with transmit/receive (T/R) modules designed to receive only one linear polarization at each interrogation.