<title>Hardware system concept For student's space synthetic aperture radar (ESA SSETI-ESMO project)</title>

Feasibility study of the space synthetic aperture radar for the SSETI-ESMO project

“…Synthetic aperture radar is an aircraft or spacecraft mounted sensor designed to obtain high-resolution radar images of the observed terrain by means of microwave radiation [9]. In this case of imaging, the radar is placed on moving platform.…”

“…For example for the SAR radar analyzed in this article raw rate data transfer can be up to 10 Mbit/s for the 12 bit ADC (analog to digital converter) [10]. The study of the literature [23] and SSAR team research [10] showed that SAR data can be sampled using 8-12 bit ADC and than degraded to 1-4 bit representation using block adaptive quantization (BAQ) algorithm [21]. The example images obtained using 12 bits data and 1 bit data are presented in Figs.…”

“…6 and 7), it can be clearly seen that the image degradation is acceptable. More detailed analysis can be found in [10]. To simplify the hardware installed on the satellite, assumed that final image processing will be performed the Earth, using and software SAR processor developed by the SSAR team.…”

“…It can be seen that the payload subsystems should be connected to the HSDB for fast data exchange and storing in the on-board memory. For the cost and weight reduction, the hardware of the SAR and communication (COMM) systems can be partially combined together [7,8].…”