Synthetic Aperture Radar is a well-known technique for remote sensing applications with great advantages like uninterrupted imaging capabilities even at night or in presence of cloud cover. However, spaceborne SAR sensors face major challenges such as cost and size, which are among the barriers against their applicability for future constellations of low-Earth observation applications. SAR sensors are not compact and require large or medium-sized satellites, which cost hundreds million dollars. To solve these challenges, the recently started SPACEBEAM project, funded by the European Commission, aims at developing a novel SAR Scan-on-Receive approach, exploiting a hybrid integrated optical beamforming network (iOBFN). The compactness and frequency flexibility of the proposed photonic solution complies with the requirements of future constellations of low-Earth orbit satellites in terms of size, weight, power consumption, and cost (SWaP-C).In the design of the SCORE SAR receiver module, we target the development of an X-band receiver having a large swath width of 50 km (5 times wider than state-of-art spaceborne SAR systems), although at the same time enabling a fine spatial resolution of 1.5 m in both along-track and across-track directions.In this paper, we present specifications and preliminary design of the SCORE-SAR receiver at equipment level, where we aim at the realization of a hermetically packaged hybrid InP/TriPleX™ photonic integrated circuit (PIC) for this application. We target the design for the PIC as well as for the RF front-end and control electronics, enabling the electrophotonic frequency down-conversion of the RF signals and the fast control of iOBFN with <300 ns switching time.
Space stringent requirements in one hand and huge demand for the high performance, low cost modules on the other hand push the Space technologies toward more compact and integrated solutions. This is a trend inherited from Electronic world being transformed from a transistor level boards to more advance and functionalized ICs with million components integrated inside. Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) based optical devices are dominating the terrestrial domain in medical facilities, datacenters and civil infrastructures. There is no doubt, in order to reduce the AIT cost and increase the performance PICs are the recommended solution for the future needs including Space Market. There are obvious advantages to use PICs instead of discrete components which could be categorized in three levels: performance, SWaP and cost. With respect to the performance, integration potentially means lower coupling loss between components. For microwave photonic application, any optical loss in dB is translated to 2 dB loss in the electrical signal. Reduced size and weight is the distinct advantage of the integration where multiple optical channels and components are designed and manufactured in small form factor with potentially improved power consumption. This reduces the packaging, qualification and assembly costs.Our recent activities regarding using PIC for Space is aiming for more compact and high performance modules. The developments include Frequency conversion, Beam forming and Lantern receiver for inter-satellite links.
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