Ubiquitous Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging (USAR-Im)

对我们的环境、周围环境、移动物体进行连续、日光和天气独立的监测地面（汽车）或空中（如交通监控）（飞机）或海上（船舶和船只监测）是可持续发展的用户和应用兴趣的一个日益重要和广泛的领域，用于后勤和安全，并且需要具有永久无处不在（微波）照明能力的卫星。由于目前用于空中交通监测的主要雷达站的业务费用极高，迫切需要具有成本效益和全球覆盖范围的替代技术。然而，传统的民用合成孔径雷达（SAR）卫星，如TerraSAR-X，TanDEM-X，COSMO-Skymed，RADARSAT-2和SENTINEL-1，运行在太阳同步轨道上，一方面只能进行白天同步观测，另一方面轨道时间在95分钟范围内，仅允许对同一感兴趣区域的重访次数为几天的数量级（如TerraSAR-X的情况）。因此，为了更长时间地观测地球上的同一地区，轨道，而不是太阳同步，应当是对地静止的，使卫星能够实际上停留在同一地点上空，并不断照亮尽可能大的感兴趣区域，从而将SES-ASTRA和EUTELSAT HOT BIRD卫星等正在运行的对地静止通信卫星系统推到本建议的关注焦点。这些系统将作为永久性和普遍存在的微波照明器进行调查和研究，用于双基地和多基地合成孔径雷达成像。本提案旨在利用具有多功能前端技术的软件定义无线电（SDR）利用地球静止通信卫星的普遍存在的微波信号，然后使用集成在通用计算机中的通用但功能强大的图形硬件（GPU）将采集的数据处理为中等分辨率（20 m）的2D/3D图像。因此，尽管所有解决的技术和技术挑战的建议，旨在证明可行性和多功能性的“无处不在的中分辨率合成孔径雷达成像”

The continuous, daylight and weather independent monitoring of our environment, of our surroundings, moving objects (e.g. traffic monitoring) on ground (cars) or in the air (aircrafts) or on sea (ship and vessel monitoring) is an increasingly important and wide field of user and application interests for sustainable development, for logistics and for security and requires satellites with a permanent ubiquitously (microwave) illumination capability. Because of the extremely high operational cost for the primary radar stations currently used for air traffic monitoring, there is an urgent need for alternative technologies yielding cost-effective and global coverage. However, conventional civilian Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, like TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, COSMO-Skymed, RADARSAT-2 and SENTINEL-1 are operated in a sun-synchronous orbit which only allows daylight synchronous observation on the one hand, while the orbit time on the other is in the range of 95 min, allowing only revisit times of the same area of interest of the order of several days (as in the case of TerraSAR-X).Therefore, in order to observe the same area on Earth for a longer time, the orbit, rather than being sun synchronous, should be geostationary enabling the satellite to virtually stay over the same spot and constantly illuminate an as large area of interest as possible, pushing the operational geostationary communication satellite systems like the SES-ASTRA and EUTELSAT HOT BIRD satellites into the focus of interest of this proposal. These systems shall be investigated and studied as permanent and ubiquitous microwave illuminators used for bi- and multistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging.This proposal aims at exploiting the ubiquitously available microwave signals of geostationary communication satellites using Software Defined Radio (SDR) with versatile front-end technology, and then subsequently process the acquired data into medium resolution (20 m) 2D/3D images using versatile but highly powerful graphics hardware (GPU), integrated in general purpose computers. Thus in spite of all addressed technical and technological challenges the proposal aims at demonstrating the feasibility and versatility of "Ubiquitous Medium Resolution SAR Imaging"